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The Story of My Mind 



-OR- 



How I Became a Rationalist 




z. 



■ BY — 

MM. MANGASARIAN 




INDEPENDENT RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 
CHICAGO 






Copyright, 1909 

BY 

M. M. Mangasarian 



(gCI.A253798 



I 



CONTENTS 



To My Children . 5 

Chapter I 
In the Cradle of Christianity ... 9 

Chapter II 
Early Struggles 22 

Chapter III 
New Temptations 31 

Chapter IV 
The Critical Period 47 

Chapter V 
Anchored at Last 65 

Chapter VI 
Some Objections to Rationalism Consid- 
ered 73 

Chapter VII 
Rationalism and the World's Religions 96 



DEDICATION 



To My Children 

My Dear Children: — 

You have often requested me to tell 
you how, having been brought up by 
my parents as a Calvinist, I came to be 
a Rationalist. I propose now to answer 
that question in a more connected and 
comprehensive way than I have ever done 
before. One reason for waiting until now 
was, that you were not old enough before, 
to appreciate fully the mental struggle 
which culminated in my resignation from 
the Spring Garden Presbyterian church 
of Philadelpha, in which, my dear Zabelle, 
you received your baptism at the time I 
was its pastor. Your brother, Armand, 
and your sister, Christine, were born after 
I had withdrawn from the Presbyterian 
church, and they have therefore not been 
baptised. But you are, all three of you, 
now sufficiently advanced in years, and in 
training, to be interested in, and I trust 



also, to be benefited by, the story of my 
religious evolution. I am going to put 
the story in Avriting that you may have 
it with you when I am gone, to remind 
you of the aims and interests for which I 
lived, as well as to acquaint j^ou with the 
most earnest and intimate period in my 
career as a teacher of men. If you should 
ever become parents yourselves, and your 
children should feel inclined to lend their 
support to dogma, I hope you will prevail 
upon them, first to read the story of their 
grand- father, who fought his way out of 
the camp of orthodoxy by grappling with 
each dogma, hand to hand and breast to 
breast. 

I have no fear that you yourselves 
will ever be drawn into the meshes of 
orthodoxy, which cost me my youth and 
the best years of my life to break through, 
or that you will permit motives of self- 
interest to estrange you from the Cause 
of Rationalism with which my life has 
been so closely identified. My assurance 
of your loyalty to freedom of thought in 
religion is not based, nor do I desire it to 
be based, on considerations of respect or 



affection which you may entertain for me 
as your father, but on your ability and 
wiUingness to verify a proposition before 
assenting to it. Do not believe me be- 
cause I am your parent, but believe what 
you have yourselves, by conscientious and 
earnest endeavor, found to be worthy of 
belief. It will never be said of you, that 
you have inherited your opinions from 
me, or borrowed them from your neigh- 
bors, if you can give a reason for the faith 
that is in you. 

I wish you also to know that during 
those years of storm and stress, when 
everything seemed so discouraging, and 
when my resignation from the church had 
left us exposed to many privations, — 
without money and without help, your 
mother's sympathy with me in my combat 
with the church — a lone man, and a mere 
youth, battling with the most powerfully 
intrenched institution in all the world, was 
more than my daily bread to me during 
the pain and travail of my second birth. 
My spirits, often depressed from sheer 
weariness, were nursed to new life and 
ardor by her patience and sympathy. 



One word more: Nothing will give 
your parents greater satisfaction than to 
see in you, increasing with the increase of 
years, a love for those ideals which instead 
of dragging the world backward, or 
arresting its progress, urge man's search 
to nobler issues. Co-operate with the 
light. Be on the side of the dawn. It is 
not enough to profess Rationalism — make 
it your religion. Devotedly, 

M. M. Mangasarian. 



CHAPTER I 

In the Cradle of Christianity 

I was a Christian because I was born one. 
My parents were Christians for the same reason. 
It had never occurred to me, any more than it 
had to my parents, to ask for any other reason 
for professing the Christian rehgion. Never in 
the least did I entertain even the most remote 
suspicion that being born in a rehgion was not 
enough, either to make the rehgion true, or to 
justify my adherence to it. 

My parents were members of the Congrega- 
tional church, and when I was only a few weeks 
old, they brought me, as I have often been told by 
those who witnessed the ceremony, to the Rev. 
Mr. Richardson, to be baptized and presented to 
the Lord. It was the vow of my mother, if she 
ever had a son, to dedicate him to the service of 
God. As I advanced in years, the one thought 
constantly instilled into my mind was that I did 
not belong to myself but to God. Every attempt 
was made to wean me from the world, and to 
suppress in me those hopes and ambitions which 
might lead me to choose some other career than 
that of the ministry. 



This constant surveillance over me, and the 
artificial sanctity associated with the life of one 
set apart for God, was injurious to me in many 
ways. Among other things it robbed me of my 
childhood. Instead of playing, I began very 
early to pray. God, Christ, Bible, and the dog- 
mas of the faith monopolized my attention, and 
left me neither the leisure nor the desire for the 
things that make childhood joyous. At the age 
of eight years I was invited to lead the congre- 
gation in prayer, in church, and could recite 
many parts of the New Testament by heart. 
One of my favorite pastimes was "to play 
church." I would arrange the chairs as I had 
seen them arranged at church, then mounting on 
one of the chairs, I would improvise a sermon 
and follow it with an unctuous prayer. All this 
pleased my mother very much, and led her to 
believe that God had condescended to accept her 
offering. 

My dear mother is still living, and is still a 
devout member of the Congregational church. 
I have not concealed my Rationalism from her, 
nor have I tried to make light of the change 
which has separated us radically in the matter 
of religion. Needless to say that my withdrawal 
from the Christian ministry, and the Christian 
religion, was a painful disappointment to her. 
But like all loving mothers, she hopes and prays 
that I may return to the faith she still holds, and 



10 



in which I was baptized. It is only natural that 
she should do so. At her age of life, beliefs have 
become so crystallized that they can not yield to 
new impressions. When my mother had convic- 
tions I was but a child, and therefore I was like 
clay in her hands, but now that I can think for 
myself my mother is too advanced in years for 
me to try to influence her. She was more suc- 
cessful with me than I shall ever be with her. 

That my mother had a great influence upon 
me, all my early life attests. As soon as I was 
old enough I was sent to college with a view of 
preparing myself for the ministry. Having fin- 
ished college I went to the Princeton Theological 
Seminary, where I received instruction from such 
eminent theologians as Drs. A. A. Hodge, Wil- 
liam H. Green, and Prof. Francis L. Patton. At 
the age of twenty-three, I became pastor of the 
Spring Garden Presbyterian church of Phila- 
delphia. 

It was the reading of Emerson and Theodore 
Parker which gave me my first glimpse of things 
beyond the creed I was educated in. I was at 
this time obstinately orthodox, and, hence, to 
free my mind from the Calvinistic teaching which 
I had imbibed with my mother's milk, was a most 
painful operation. Again and again, during the 
period of doubt, I returned to the bosom of my 
early faith, just as the legendary dove, scared 
by the waste of waters, returned to the ark. To 

II 



dislodge the shot fired into a wall is not nearly so 
difficult an operation as to tear one's self forever 
from the early beliefs which cling closer to the 
soul than the skin does to the bones. 

While it was the reading of a new set of books 
which first opened my eyes, these would have left 
no impression upon my mind had not certain 
events in my own life, which I was unable to 
reconcile with the belief in a ''Heavenly Father", 
created in me a predisposition to inquire into the 
foundations of my Faith. 

An event, which happened when I was only 
a boy, gave me many anxious thoughts about the 
truth of the beliefs my dear mother had so elo- 
quently instilled into me. The one thought I 
was imbued with from my youth was that "the 
tender mercies of God are over all his children,'' 
I believed myself to be a child of God, and 
counted confidently upon his special providence. 
But when the opportunity came for providence 
to show his interest in me, I was forsaken, and 
had to look elsewhere for help. My first dis- 
appointment was a severe shock. I got over it 
at the time, but when I came to read Rationalistic 
books, the full meaning of that early experience, 
which I will now briefly relate, dawned upon me, 
and helped to make my mind good soil for the 
new ideas. 

In 1877 I was traveling in Asia Minor, going 
from the Euphrates to the Bosphorus, accom- 

12 



panied by the driver of my horses, one of which 
I rode, the other carrying my luggage. We had 
not proceeded very far when we were overtaken 
by a young traveler on foot, who, for reasons of 
safety, begged to join our little party. He was 
a Mohammedan, while my driver and I professed 
the Christian religion. 

For three days we traveled together, going at 
a rapid pace in order to overtake the caravan. 
It need hardly be said that in that part of the 
world it is considered unsafe to travel even with 
a caravan, but, to go on a long journey, as we 
were doing, all by ourselves, was certainly taking 
a great risk. 

We were armed with only a rifle — one of those 
flint fire-arms which frequently refused to go off. 
I forgot to say that my driver had also hanging 
from his girdle a long and crooked knife sheathed 
in a black canvas scabbard. Both the driver, 
who was a Christian, and the Mohammedan, who 
had placed himself under our protection, were, 
I am sorry to say, much given to boasting. They 
would tell how, on various occasions, they had, 
single-handed, driven away the Kurdish brig- 
ands, who outnumbered them, ten to one; how 
that rusty knife had disemboweled one of the 
most renowned Kurdish chiefs, and how the 
silent and meek-looking flint-gun had held at bay 
a pack of those ''curs" who go about scenting for 
human flesh. All this was reassuring to me — a 

13 



lad of seventeen, and I began to think that I was 
indebted to Providence for my brave escort. 

On the morning of the i8th of February, 1877, 
we reached the valley said to be a veritable den 
of thieves, where many a traveler had lost his 
life as well as his goods. A great fear fell upon 
us when we saw on the wooden bridge which 
spanned the river at the base of the hills, two 
Kurds riding in our direction. I was at once 
disillusioned as to the boasted bravery of my 
comrades, and felt that it was all braggadocio 
with which they had been regaling me. As I 
was the one supposed to have money, I would 
naturally be the chief object of attack, which 
made my position the more perilous. But this 
sudden fear which seemed to paralyze me at first, 
was followed by a bracing resolve to cope with 
these ^'devils" mentally. 

As I look back now upon the events of that 
day, I am puzzled to know how I got through it 
all without any serious harm to my person. I was 
surprised also that I, who had been brought up 
to pray and to trust in divine help, forgot in the 
hour of real peril, all about "other help" and bent 
all my energies upon helping myself. 

But why did I not pray? Why did I not fall 
upon my knees to commit myself to God's keep- 
ing? Perhaps it was because I was too much 
pre-occupied — too much in earnest to take the 
time to pray. Perhaps my better instincts would 

14 



not let me take refuge in words when something 
stronger was wanted. We may ask the good 
Lord not to burn our house, but when the house 
is actually on fire, water is better than prayer. 
Perhaps, again, I did not pray because of an in- 
stinctive feeling that this was a case of self-help 
or no help at all. Perhaps, again, there was a 
feeling in me, that if all the prayers my mother 
and I had ofifered did not save me from falling 
into the hands of thieves neither would any new 
prayer that I might offer be of any help. But 
the fact is that in the hour of positive and immi- 
nent peril — when face to face with death — I was 
too busy to pray. 

My mother, before I started on this journey, 
had made a bag for my valuables — watch and 
chain, etc. — and sewed it on my underflannels, 
next to my body. But my money (all in gold 
coins) was in a snuff-box, and that again in a 
long silk purse. I was, of course, the better 
dressed of the three — with long boots which 
reached higher than my knees, a warm English 
broadcloth cloak reaching down to my ankles, 
and an Angora collarette, soft and snow white, 
about my neck. 

I rode ahead, and the others, with the baggage 
horse, followed me. When the two Kurdish 
riders who were advancing in our direction 
reached me, they saluted me very politely, saying, 
according to the custom of the country, "God be 

IS 



with you/' to which I timidly returned the cus- 
tomary answer, "We are all in his keeping.'' 
At the time it did not occur to me how absurd 
it was for both travelers and robbers to recom- 
mend each other to God while carrying fire-arms 
— the ones for attack, the others for defense. 

Of course now I can see, though I could not at 
the time I am speaking of, that God never inter- 
fered to save an unarmed traveler from brigands 
— I say never, for if he ever did, and could, he 
would do it always. But as we know, alas, too 
well, that hundreds and thousands have been 
robbed and cut to pieces by these Kurds, it would 
be reasonable to infer that God is indifferent. Of 
course, the strongly-armed travelers, as a rule, 
escape, thanks to their own courage and fire- 
arms. For, we ask again, if the Lord can save 
one, why not all ? And if he can save all, but will 
not, does he not become as dangerous as the 
robbers? But really if God could do anything 
in the matter. He would reform the Kurds out 
of the land, or — out of the thieving business. .If 
God is the unfailing police force in Christian 
lands, he is not that in Mohammedan countries, 
at any rate. 

As the two mounted Kurds passed by me, they 
scanned me very closely — my costume, boots, 
furs, cap and so on. Then I heard them making 
inquiries of my driver about me — who I was, 
where I was going, and why I was going at all. 

i6 



I 



My driver answered these inquiries as honestly 
Has the circumstances permitted. Wishing us all 
* again the protection of Allah, the Kurds spurred 
their horses and galloped away. 

For a moment we began to breathe freely — but 
only for a moment, for as our horses reached 
the bridge we saw that the Kurds had turned 
around and were now following us. And before 
we reached the middle of the bridge over the 
river, one of the Kurds galloping up close to me 
laid his hand on my shoulders and, unceremo- 
niously, pulled me out of my saddle. At the same 
time he dismounted himself, while his partner 
remained on horseback with his gun pointed 
squarely in my face, and threatening to kill me if 
I did not give him my money immediately. 

I can never forget his savage grin when at last 
he found my purse, and grabbing it, with another 
oath, pulled it out of its hiding place. I have al- 
ready described that my coins were all in a little 
box hid away in my purse, hence, as soon as the 
robber had loosened the strings he took out the 
box, held it in his left" hand, while with his right 
he kept searching in the inner folds of my long 
purse. While he was running his fingers through 
the tortuous purse, I slipped mine into his left 
hand, and, taking hold of the box, I emptied its 
contents into my pocket in the twinkling of an 
eye and handed it back to the robber. The Kurd 
incensed at finding nothing in the purse which he 

17 



kept shaking and fingering, snatched the box 
from my hand, opened it, and finding it as empty 
as the purse, flung it away with an oath. 

"Are you Moslems or Christians?" inquired 
one of the Kurds, to my companions. 

"We are all Moslems, by Allah,'' they an- 
swered. 

In Turkey you are not supposed to speak the 
truth unless vou say, "by Allah," which means 
''by Godr 

Of course it was not true that I was a Moham- 
medan. My companions told the Kurds a false- 
hood about me, to save my life. There was no 
doubt the Kurds would have killed me, but for 
the lie which I did not correct. When I reached 
my destination many of my co-religionists de- 
clared that I had denied Christ by allowing the 
Kurds to think that I was a Moslem. 

As I feel now, my conscience does not trouble 
m.e for helping, by my silence, to deceive the 
Kurds about my religion. In withholding the 
truth from these would-be assassins I was doing 
them no evil, but protecting the most sacred 
rights of man, the Kurd's included. Here was an 
instance in which silence was golden. But I 
would not hesitate, any moment, to mislead a 
thief or a murderer, by speech, as well as by 
silence. If it is right to kill the murderer in self- 
defense, it is right to deny him also the truth. 

But young as I was, what alarmed me at the 

i8 



time was that we should have been led into tke 
temptation of lying to save our lives. Why did 
a ''Heavenly Father'' deliver us to the brigands ? 
And of what help was God to us, if, in real peril, 
we had to resort to fighting or falsehood for 
self-protection? In what way would the world 
have been worse off without a ''Heavenly 
Father?" 

About a month after I arrived at my destina- 
tion, I received a letter from my mother, to 
whom the driver, upon his return, had related my 
adventure with the Kurds. Without paying the 
least thought to the fact that we had to lie to 
save our lives, my mother claimed that it was her 
prayers which had saved me from the brigands. 

Sancta Simplicitas! 

' But my hospitality to new tendencies did not 
in the least diminish the anguish and pain of the 
separation from the religion of my mother. 
Even after I began to seriously doubt many of 
the beHefs I had once accepted as divine, it 
seemed impossible to abandon them. Ten thou- 
sand obstacles blocked my way, and as many 
voices seemed to caution me against sailing forth 
upon an unknown sea. In a modest way, I was 
like Columbus, separated from the new world I 
was seeking, by the dark and tempestuous waste 
of waters. How often my heart sank within me ! 
I was almost sure of a better and larger world 

19 



beyond Calvin, or Christ even, but the huge sea 
rolled between and struck terror upon my mind. 

But if there are difficulties, there is a way out 
of them. I am glad that the difficulties, great 
and insurmountable as they seemed at the time, 
did not succeed in holding me back. Between 
Calvinism and Rationalism flowed the deep, dark 
sea of fear. I have crossed that sea. Behind me 
is theology with its mysteries and dogmas ; before 
me are the sunny fields of science. Born in the 
world of John Calvin, baptised in the name of 
the Holy Trinity, and set apart for the Christian 
ministry, — I have become a Rationalist. The 
meaning of both these words, Calvinist and Ra- 
tionalist, will, I hope, become clear to all the 
readers of this book. The difference between 
the Calvinist and the Rationalist is not that the 
one uses his reason, while the other does not. 
Both use their reason. It is by using his reason 
that the Calvinist is not a Catholic, for instance, 
or a Mohammedan. In the same way the Catho- 
lic reasons for his church and against Calvinism. 
To say that Christianity, or Judaism, should be 
accepted on faith, without first subjecting its 
claims to the strain of reason, is also reasoning. 
Such is the constitution of the mind, that even 
when men seek to suppress reason, they are com- 
pelled to offer reasons for doing so. 

But there is reasoning and reasoning. The 
Bushman has his reason for trusting in his amu- 

20 



lets; the civilized man, his, for trusting in self- 
help. Just as the eyes must have light before 
they can see, Reason must have knowledge before 
it can reason truly. But it is possible to possess 
knowledge and still reason badly, just as a man 
may be in the light, and still not see — by keeping 
his eyes shut. 

Nor does it follow that if a man opens his eyes 
he will see. The eyes obey the will; if we do 
not wish to see, we will not see even with our 
eyes open. There are many educated people who 
allow motives of self-interest, if not to blind, at 
least to blur their vision. 

Finally, it is not enough to see for ourselves. 
We must show to others what we see : My ob- 
ject for telling the story of my mind — how it 
passed from Calvinism to Rationalism, — is to 
help others see what I see. 



ai 



CHAPTER II 
Early Struggles 

As I look back upon the period of mental con- 
flict and uncertainty which marked the closing 
years of my pastorate in the Presbyterian church, 
I am comforted by the thought that I did not 
wait until I was accused of heresy, tried by an 
ecclesiastical court and dismissed from the 
church before I severed my connection with the 
Presbyterian denomination. On the contrary, as 
soon as I had fully persuaded myself that I was 
no longer a Presbyterian, I, of my own accord, 
offered my resignation, after stating publicly the 
reasons which had led me to renounce Calvinism. 
It was not the church that expelled me; it was 
I that renounced the church. 

Of course, even then there were those, who 
demanded a public trial and my formal deposi- 
tion from the ministry. The Philadelphia Pres- 
bytery met to discuss whether I should not be 
summoned to appear before them, to receive their 
censure. But wiser counsel prevailed, and a sen- 
sational public trial was avoided. The district 
attorney of the city of Philadelphia, Mr. George 
Graham, himself a staunch Presbyterian, ex- 

22 



plained to the ministers that my resignation had 
deprived them of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction 
over me. I had, he explained, unlocked the door 
and walked out into the open, and it was too 
late now to talk of expelling me. On the other 
hand, although my complete severance from Cal- 
vinism had been fully announced, still for many 
days and nights my house was filled with mem- 
bers of my church urging me to remain with 
them as their pastor, and to hold on to the church 
building. I am very happy to think that I was 
able to resist this temptation too. Had I yielded 
to their entreaties, or allowed myself to be 
swayed by their arguments, I would have been 
placed in a position where I could neither be a 
Rationalist nor a Calvinist, but a preacher of am- 
biguities, contradicting in one breath what I had 
said in another. From such a career of duplicity 
and arrested growth, I was saved by a fortunate 
decision on my part to give up Presbyterian prop- 
erty as well as 'the Presbyterian creed. 

The first Sunday after my resignation, I spoke 
in a hall on Broad street, in Philadelphia. It 
was quite a change from a handsome church edi- 
fice to a secular hall. I could see that those who 
followed me out of the Presbyterian denomina- 
tion felt ill at ease, on a Sunday morning in a 
public hall. But that was not the worst shock 
in store for them. 

When I reached the hall on Broad street it 

23 



was so densely packed that it seemed impossible 
for me to reach the platform. In the meantime, 
my trustees were getting anxious about my fail- 
ure to appear in the pulpit. The audience too 
was showing signs of discomfort in the crowded 
auditorium. It was only by announcing iiiy 
name, and begging those who stood up in rows 
at the entrance, — all the seats being occupied — • 
to help me reach the stage, that I could make 
any progress through the crowd. When at lasc 
I faced the audience to deliver my first address 
from a free platform, I thought of the advice 
given me by my trustees, that, as much depended 
upon the impression of my first talk, which would 
in all probability be extensively reported in the 
papers, I should take care not to go ''too far." 
What they meant by not going ''too far," was 
that I should let the public know that in the 
essentials I was as Christian as ever. I do not 
blame my friends for this advice. They trem- 
bled for me and for the organization which was 
to be launched for the first time on that day. 
Besides, they were themselves, Presbyterians 
still, at heart, and had no clear understanding 
of the meaning of my renunciation of Calvin- 
ism. Sentimentally they were with me, but by 
training and conviction they were still for the 
creed of their ancestors. 

Speaking frankly, I had myself agreed to the 
wisdom of being careful and conservative in my 

24 



opening address, believing that radical utterances 
at this time would make me more enemies than 
friends. But when I began to speak, in the en- 
thusiasm of the moment, joyous over the first 
taste of freedom of speech, I forgot my caution, 
and gave my thoughts as they welled up within 
me, full scope. ''To the winds with policy and 
calculation! Whether I win followers, or lose 
the last man, I must not stammer, — I must 
speak!" Under the spell of this thought, which 
seemed to seize me without at all consulting me, 
I said many things which changed the color on 
the faces of my Presbyterian supporters. 

Unused to freedom of speech, and brought up 
to believe certain beliefs as sacred, the attempt 
on my part to subject these to the strain of rea- 
son was in the nature of a painful disappoint- 
ment to them. Thus many of my followers lost 
heart and quickly returned to the cradle from 
which, in a moment of excitement, they had 
leaped forth. But new friends took the place 
of those who deserted the young movement, and 
in a very short time, a larger hall was secured. 
This was St. George's hall, on Arch street, one 
of the largest halls in Philadelphia. But up to 
this time we, including myself, believed ourselves 
to be still Christians, though no longer Presby- 
terians. As long as we held on to the name of 
Christian we continued to sail in comparatively 
smooth waters. We made the word "Christian," 

25 



of course, to mean what we wanted it to mean. 

But very soon new perplexities arose. The 
people who came to hear me, and who paid the 
expenses of the new organization, as well as 
directed its policy, while they progressed suffi- 
ciently to renounce Presbyterianism, they were 
very reluctant to part with Christianity alto- 
gether. I could criticise Calvin to my heart's 
content, but I must not, Christ. The church, or 
churchianity, certainly deserved to be investi- 
gated, and its errors exposed, but Christ and 
Christianity were too sacred to be handled with 
equal freedom. My trustees felt that as a lib- 
eral Christian organization, there was a great 
future before us; we would soon become one 
of the largest and most prosperous religious 
bodies in the city ; but if we "attacked'' Christ — 
they called examining the teachings and charac- 
ter of Christ freely "attacking" Christ — we 
would be disowned by all respectable members, 
and lose our standing in the esteem of a hitherto 
friendly public. 

And the public was indeed friendly at this 
stage of our evolution. The press of Philadel- 
phia, as well as of New York City, reported 
daily, for some time, the doings of the new or- 
ganization. The majority of the editorials in 
the daily papers commended the course I had 
taken in avoiding a "heresy trial," and in resist- 
ing the great temptation to resort to shifts and 

26 



subterfuges to enable me to remain at a lucra- 
tive post. In these days (^) departures from Or- 
thodoxy were rare, and naturally, my case cre- 
ated a great stir. But as I have intimated, the 
preponderance of criticism and comment was fav- 
orable. Encouraging letters from Henry Ward 
Beecher, Lyman Abbott, Prof. David Swing, and 
other prominent leaders gave the new society an 
enviable prestige. But my trustees protested that 
this ''good wiir' of the public, which constituted 
our best asset, would be lost, and its sympathy 
turned into antagonism, if I spoke as freely of 
Christ as I did of Calvin, and subjected the Bible 
to the same strain of reason that I did the West- 
minster Catechism. In other words, I was po- 
litely made to feel that while it was respectable 
enough to part with Presbyterianism, it would 
spell ruin to part also with Christianity. 

In justice to my supporters I must state that 
when I resigned from the Presbyterian church 
I had no idea that the step would eventually 
carry me beyond Christianity itself. "A purer 
Christianity" was my plea at that time, and I 
sincerely believed that with Calvinism out of the 
way there would be left no serious obstacle for 
reason to stumble over. I was not prepared at 
that stage of my evolution to perceive the im- 
possibility of separating Calvinism from Chris- 
tianity without destroying both. Calvinism was 
a symptom and not the disease itself. The disease 

(1) 1886. 

27 



was supernaturalism. of which the different sects 
are the manifestations. It is the disease and not 
its manifestation that required suppression. 1 
was unable to see the relationship between an 
infinite God, sovereign of all, and Calvinism, and 
fancied in my mind that I could keep God and 
let Calvin go. But faith in a God who knows 
everything and is absolutely sovereign, spells 
Calvinism. 

The step out of Christianity was infinitely more 
difficult than the step out of Presbyterianism. 
Had my followers been trained to think ration- 
ally, they would have seen that since I did not 
resign from the Presbyterian church, for a differ- 
ent form of baptism, or communion, but because 
of its failure to recognize Reason as the highest 
authority in religion, I was bound, by the very 
stress and logic of my premises, to drop Chris* 
tianity as I had been led to drop Calvinism. 

Aly trustees were quite unconscious of giving 
me dangerous advice, or of trying to make of 
me an example of arrested development. They 
were my friends, and the friends of the cause, 
but they could not think logically, and that is 
why they could not appreciate my reply that we 
are not free to command the truth, — we must 
obey the truth. 

Matters came to a crisis when I delivered a 
lecture on ^'Was Jesus God ?" I can still see the 
painful expression on the faces of many of my 

28 



hearers on that Sunday morning. Did I bring 
them out of the Presbyterian church to make ''in- 
fidels" and ''blasphemers'* of them? A number 
of my hearers rose and left the hall. The strain 
upon me was severe. When I sat down I was 
in a profuse perspiration. When all was over, 
I must have looked ashen pale. I had hardly any 
strength left to announce the closing hymn. But 
my audience suffered perhaps even more than 
did I. To part with Jesus is not the same thing 
as parting with Calvin, and that morning I had 
told them that if Calvin goes, Jesus must go too. 

Cest le premier pas qui coute, 

"It is the first step that costs." But I found 
my second step even more costly. Voltaire speaks 
of the inevitableness of the second step if the 
first is taken. They told him how St. Denis had 
picked up his own head after it had been chopped 
off by the executioner, and walked a hundred 
;teps with it in his hands. He replied, "I can 
believe in the ninety-nine steps, it is the first step 
[ find difficulty in believing." Granted the first 
step, the ninety-nine, or nine million steps are 
very easy. Would it not be wasteful to argue 
that St. Denis took the first step, but no more? 
Is it not equally superfluous to accept one miracle 
in the Bible, and deny the rest? If one miracle, 
why not a million? But the aim of the training 
we had received in the church was not to help 
us to think logically but how not to think logic- 

29 



ally. The state of the Christian church, divided, 
sub-divided, and voicing doctrines diametrically 
opposed the one to the other, while they all claim 
to be and are, equally scriptural is a proof of 
this. I do not blame therefore, the members of 
my society for taking offense or for withdrawingj 
as many of them did after the "Jesus'' lecture, 
their support from my work. They could not 
see the incongruity of accepting one part and re- 
jecting another of a ''divine" revelation. If the 
texts upon which Calvin based his theology were 
doubtful, what assurance could we have of the 
genuineness of the more liberal texts. The ob- 
scurity or ambiguity of Jesus w^as really the cause 
of the contradictions and divisions of his fol- 
lowers. The obscurity and contradictory nature 
of the text accounts for the crowd of religious 
sects, each claiming to be the only church of 
Christ, or, at least, more scriptural than its com- 
petitors. It was both a moral as well as a men- 
tal relief to escape the bewildering confusion of 
such a situation. And it was after I had com- 
manded the babel of clashing voices to hush that 
I could hear the still, small voice of Reason, 



30 



CHAPTER III. 
New Temptations 

Notwithstanding our many heresies we still 
believed in Christianity — in its moral excellence, 
as we expressed it. Jesus was not God; Calvin 
was all wrong; but still there was that in Chris- 
tianity which could not be found elsewhere. 
While I myself did not linger long in this inde- 
cisive mood, still it was very trying while it 
lasted. To soften a little the pain of losing Jesus 
the God, the temptation to exalt him as a perfect 
moral teacher beyond all others the world had 
ever seen very nearly swamped me. But there 
w€re also financial considerations which made 
my position at this stage a very critical one. I 
was, besides, so much in need of companionship 
and sympathy that I wonder now why I did not 
rush into the open arms of the first liberal Chris- 
tian sect that offered to fellowship with me. 

And there were religious fellowships ready to 
receive us. Let me first speak of the Unitarians, 
who very kindly offered to help us, both morally 
and financially. We were not told that we had 
to join the denomination before we could receive 
financial assistance. They offered to help us 

31 



without any conditions. The Unitarians have a 
fund to help all ''liberal" religious movements, 
and as a 'liberar' religious movement, we could, 
if we wished, draw upon that fund. We did not 
accept the financial help, but we v/ere happy to 
receive such moral support as men like James 
Freeman Clarke, Edward Everett Hale, Minot 
J. Savage and other equally distinguished preach- 
ers of Unitarianism could give us. The vener- 
able Dr. Furness, more than once, occupied my 
pulpit, as also the Rev. Gordon Ames, whose 
church also proposed my name for a life mem- 
bership in the American Unitarian Association. 
I can never be too grateful to the Unitarians for 
their hospitality to me in those trying times. 
Both Dr. Clarke and Dr. Hale had received me 
in their homes and given me such counsel as a 
young man at the threshold of a new career 
stands in need of. It was thus that Unitarianism, 
with its gracious hospitality, its tolerance and 
liberality, came very near persuading me that 
having gone as far as Unitarianism, it was not 
necessary to go farther. Thus you see, Moses 
and Calvin came back to me dressed as Unita- 
rians; but, fortunately for me, I recognized the 
disguise. 

If I could "settle down'' in Unitarianism, why 
did I leave the Presbyterian church? The dif- 
ference between them is after all a difference 
of quantity. The Presbyterians believe more 

32 



than the Unitarians, and while the Bible is in- 
spired from cover to cover for the former, the 
latter believe only in the authority of certain por- 
tions of the book. Ernest Renan told the Pro- 
testants that they did not have sufficient reason 
for leaving the Catholic church. "But we could 
not believe in the mass,'' replied the Protestants. 
"If you believe in the virgin birth and the res- 
urrection of the flesh, what but a whim could 
prevent you from believing also in transubstan- 
tiation," argued Renan. We can say the same 
of Unitarianism. If it can believe in parts of 
the Bible, as "inspired" or if it can accept, the 
unity of God, or "the Lordship of Jesus," why 
not believe a little more ? If it drops one dogma 
on grounds of reason, it must drop all, and if it 
can accept one dogma, the "Lordship of Jesus," 
for example, on faith, why not also the Trinity? 
If God exists, he could be in three or more parts 
quite as easily as in one. 

Unwittingly the Unitarian church has helped 
to strengthen the cause of Orthodoxy. It speaks 
of Christ as the most perfect being or teacher 
who has ever visited this planet — a being pos- 
sessing all the virtues, and none of the defects 
of human nature, — a being worthy to be called 
in a special sense, "the Son of God." 

"Very well," answers the Orthodox believer, 
"If Jesus was all that, he was God." The dif- 
ference between Unitarianism and Orthodoxy is 



that, while the latter calls Christ a God, the 
former holds that he was more than man. The 
point is not worth fighting for. Moreover, "If 
Christ was the type of perfection, as you Uni- 
tarians seem to believe," argues the Calvinist, 
"he could not have claimed to be God, as he cer- 
tainly does, unless he was God. If he was not 
God, he was an impostor, and not the most per- 
fect type of character the world has ever seen, 
as you claim." The answer is decisive. If Jesus 
believed himself to be only a mortal like our- 
selves, how explain his language of authority, 
his forgiving of sins, his miracles, his claim to 
be equal with the Father, and to have existed 
from all time ? The weapons which Unitarianism 
uses against Orthodoxy, the latter can easily ig- 
nore. Nay, Unitarians are often quoted by the 
Orthodox to prove that even those who deny the 
divinity of Jesus, are compelled to admit "that 
there never was another like unto Him." The 
point I am endeavoring to make is that I could 
not accept Unitarianism because its claim about 
the moral perfection of Jesus was as much an 
unreasoned dogma, as the belief in his divinity. 
If I could subscribe to one dogma, why not to 
all ? If there is no evidence that Jesus was God, 
neither is there any that he was morally perfect. 
I am aware that there are Unitarians who do 
not accept even the moral perfection of Jesus. 
But that only helps to confuse us as to what 

34 



Unitarianism really stands for. If Jesus was not 
morally perfect, or the wisest and best teacher, 
why does he monopolize the Unitarian pulpit? 
In conclusion, as already intimated, Unitarianism 
with its God-idea differs from Calvinism, not in 
kind, but in degree only. Its baggage of the 
supernatural is not quite so heavy, but what there 
is of it is every whit as supernatural. 

But my inexperienced bark had hardly weath- 
ered the Unitarian storm which, as I confessed, 
came very near driving me under shelter, before 
another danger confronted me and my struggling 
society. The financial problem was, of course, a 
pressing one with us. Hall rent had to be paid, 
which was considerable, and the lecturer and his 
family had to be supported. The independent 
course I was following was not adding to the 
revenues of the society. The moneyed people, 
and the people accustomed to making generous 
contributions for church purposes, did not ap- 
prove of my Rational tendencies. It was at this 
time that Spiritualism crossed my path, and en- 
deavored, if I may use so trite a phrase, "to 
flirt with me.'' "I could have many new sup- 
porters, and some moneyed men and women, 
if I could see the truth of Spiritualism," was 
whispered in my ears by my own fears and 
hopes. And then hardly a Sunday passed when 
at the conclusion of the lecture I was not met by 
some believer in Spiritualism, who told me how 

55 



i 



he or she had seen Darwin, or Emerson, or 
Goethe, or Voltaire at my side on the platform, 
while I was delivering my address, and how 
one or the other had smiled upon me with ap- 
proval-. I received messages purporting to come 
from the world of Spirits, commending my 
course, and bidding me to go forward unafraid. 
Opportunities were given me to see tables tip, 
to hear "celestial" voices, and to be surprised by 
flashes of light in perfectly dark rooms. 

For many of the friends who tried to lead my 
steps toward Spiritualism, I still cherish the ten- 
derest thoughts. They befriended me and my 
wife, they helped to render those desolate days 
of anxiety and hardship a little less of a strain 
upon our resources. But I could become a Spirit- 
ualist only with my eyes shut, and I had opened 
them when I parted with Calvinism. Was I now 
going to shut my eyes again? 

My neighbor and colleague. Dr. John E. Rob- 
erts, who left the Baptist church to join the 
Unitarians, and later, became minister of the 
Church of this World, has recently expressed his 
interest in Spiritualism. He thinks the Spiritual- 
ists have the most comforting doctrine, because 
of their hope of immortality. Dr. Roberts thinks 
that we need the spiritual glow of faith in im- 
mortality to keep us from withering. But is not 
immortality as inconceivable as the Trinity? 
Why should a man object to the Baptist or the 

21^ 



Unitarian immortality, if he can accept the im- 
mortahty of the SpirituaHsts ? Is the evidence 
furnished by modern mediums more convincing 
than that furnished by the mediums in the Bible ? 
Are the spirits who manifest themselves in the 
Old and New Testaments, impostors, while those 
who appear to Mrs. Piper in Brooklyn are genu- 
ine? And is the immortality promised by Mrs. 
Piper's ghosts different, or better, than the im- 
mortality promised by those who communed with 
Jesus, Peter and Paul? But let us hear Dr. 
Roberts' reasons for preferring the Spiritualist's 
certain hope of another life to the silence of Ra- 
tionalism on the question of the hereafter: 

''And then I think there is need of a revival 
along the line of cherishing the old-fashioned 
hopes. You can see in current literature a strong 
tendency towards the belief that this world is the 
end of it. It is surprising to one that will bear 
in mind how often he finds that strain of pessi- 
mism. Men and women in very great numbers 
are beginning to think that after all maybe eter- 
nal sleep is better than eternal life. For, in the 
grave there can come no pain, no sorrow, no 
tears. 'On the shore of that vast sea of oblivion 
no wave of sorrow breaks.' But, to my mind, life 
is too sweet ever to be given up, and I can't help 
liking the old-fashioned hope that there is some- 
thing beyond; that we shall remember and find 
each other and make reparations for wrongs we 



have done and explain some things that were mis- 
understood here. In other words, that we shall 
live again. For one, without knowing a thing 
about it, I cling to the old-fashioned hope of im- 
mortality.'' 

But is it correct to identify ''the old-fashioned 
hope" with optimism, and ''the belief that eternal 
sleep is better than eternal life,'' or that "in the 
grave there can come no pain, no sorrow, no 
tears," — with pessimism? "The old-fashioned 
hope" was no hope at all, because it was a pri- 
vate and exclusive hope. It reserved a place in 
heaven for the few, the elect, — whether Jewish, 
Mohammedan or Christian, — and condemned the 
multitude to the pains of hell. Can such a hope 
make for optimism? Can such a prospect brace 
up humanity at large? Moreover, the "old- 
fashioned hope's" picture of eternal life is so 
prosaic, so savorless, that it has fallen into "in- 
nocuous desuetude" even among the elect. Men 
have expressed their hesitation to decide which 
they would prefer, the heaven or the hell of the 
"old-fashioned hope." The grave is more opti- 
mistic than the old-fashioned future. 
Ah, withm our Mother s breast, 
From toil and tumult, sin and sorrozv free, 
Sphered beyond hope and dread, divinely calm, 
They lie, all gathered into perfect rest. 
And o'er the trance of their Eternity. 
The cypress waves more holy than the palm. 

38 



But Dr. Roberts likes ''eternal life" of some 
kind. Eternal life! We fear our good friend 
has stooped to a sonorous phrase. Pliny, one 
of the illustrious philosophers of the reign of 
Trajan, thought that man was more fortunate 
than the gods, because, while ''the gods cannot 
die, man can.'' We are not in a position to tell 
whether or not "eternal life'' is desirable, for we 
do not know what it is. How can we desire, or 
despise the inconceivable? No one can tell 
whether it is an evil or a blessing to live forever 
and ever, and ever, and ever, — and ever — unless 
he has experienced it. Nor can anyone affirm 
"eternal life" (we think Dr. Roberts means con- 
scious, personal immortality) until he has lived 
through an eternity. To live a million, million 
years, is not eternal life. Hence, no one who has 
not so lived, can speak intelligently of "eternal 
life." We cannot even say that the gods are im- 
mortal. Because they have lived until now, so 
to speak, is no argument that they will live for- 
ever. We have to wait until they prove their 
ability to live forever, and ever, and ever, before 
we can pronounce them immortal. No being can 
be called immortal until he has lived to the end 
of time. We do not affirm, nor do we deny, the 
inconceivable. The question of the hereafter is 
still an open one. There is no reason why people 
should not speculate about it. We may even hope 
that tomorrow's science will throw more light 

39 



upon this interesting problem, but today, all we 
know about eternal life is that we do not know 
anything about it. 

/ gazed (as oft Fve gazed the same) 
To try if I could wrench aught out of death, 
Which could confirm, or shake, or make a faith, 
But it was all a mystery. Here we are. 

Yes, "Here we are," — that is the great reality. 
There is cheer and hope and love even in the 
thought that the present hour is big with possi- 
bilities and sweet with memories. We need not 
think of the grave while our hearts pulse, and 
our blood is warm. It is queer how all believers 
in eternal life fear the grave and deepen its 
gloom. The thought of another life often im- 
poverishes the life we now possess. Pining for 
the far away tomorrow, we lose the joy at our 
doors. Schiller describes a recluse at the bar of 
heaven, arguing that he must have great rewards 
because he has practiced great privations in life. 
He received a chilling answer. He is told that 
if he was foolish enough to let the real life slip 
through his fingers for a distant reward, there 
is no power that can make good his losses. 

Real optimism springs from the thought that 
the present life may be made dearer and nobler, 
richer, and happier, and that we may so live as 
to leave behind us a long and fragrant memory: 

40 



The ripe products of a fertile brain 
Will live and reproduce fair fruit again. 

Even at its worst, death is an obligation we 
owe posterity, and the discharge of it should 
make no one a pessimist. At any rate, with 
Grant Allen, we can sing when we feel life's 
evening gathering about us : 

Perchance a little light will come with morning; 
Perchance I shall but sleep. 

Dr. Roberts admits, I believe, that he has no 
evidence to ofifer, except what he calls "the in- 
nate desire for another life." But if the desire 
for immortality proves another and an endless 
life, the desire for God, or Christ, or an infallible 
Revelation, ought to be sufficient to prove their 
existence. The Spiritualists, like the Orthodox, 
reason logically enough against beliefs not their 
own, but when it comes to their own dogmas 
they do not consult reason at all. I had left 
Calvinism because it failed to furnish the evi- 
dence for its claims, how then could I join the 
Spiritualists with no more evidence to substan- 
tiate their claims than that it was pleasant to de- 
sire another life? But there is the testimony of 
the mediums ; yes, and there is the testimony of 
the apostles. If the latter is not enough to make 
Christianity true, the former is not enough to 
prove Spiritualism. 

41 



The comparatively few lines in which I have 
tried to tell my early experience as a Rationalist 
give but an imperfect idea of the effort required 
under circumstances of stress and anxiety, to 
keep my ship steady on the troublous waters to 
which the winds outside the harbor of Calvinism 
had driven me. In the words of Shelley, I had 
unfurled my sails to the tempest, and fear and 
alarm were to be my portion, until I became more 
accustomed to the swing of the sea, and could 
command the stars to point the way. The open 
sea is not like the sheltered harbor. It is easy 
to go out to sea, but not so easy to find one's 
way there. 

During this period of mental struggle to work 
out a philosophy of life which should fill the 
vacuum created by the collapse of theology, I 
was frequently approached by well-meaning, but 
over-confident, teachers who, in their own opin- 
ion, at any rate, had completely and satisfactorily 
reconciled religion with Reason. Nearly every 
mail brought me letters recommending some pub- 
lication which would answer all my difficulites as 
it had theirs. Not a few of my would-be helpers 
went to the trouble of calling on me with the 
same object in view. I shall only speak here of 
one of the books which was supposed to have 
untied all the knots, divine and human, which 
have ever perplexed the brain of man. The book 
came to me highly recommended. Even Presi- 

42 



dent Eliot of Harvard had publicly endorsed it. 
While it was many years after the period I am 
now writing of, that my attention was called to 
this book, nevertheless, it is because the book is 
typical of the efforts to make Reason approve of 
the fundamentals of the popular faith, that I 
reproduce here what I said of it at the time: 

Balance is the name of a little book with a 
great aim. Its author, Mr. Orlando Smith, sets 
out as a new Columbus to discover not another 
earth, but another truth, which shall give to all 
known truths new meaning and worth. This 
truth, he believes, he has discovered, and christens 
it, ''The Fundamental Verity.'' Lucid illustra- 
tions are massed together with telling effect, to 
show that Nature is equipped with a self-curative 
genius which makes discord an impossibility. 
"That which is overdone in one direction is un- 
derdone equally in an opposite direction. This 
rhythm, this equivalence which pulls the pendu- 
lum in one direction as far as it pushes it in an- 
other is the Fundamental Verity, which, if 
grasped as universal and infallible, will remove 
from our shoulders what Shakespeare calls "the 
weary weight of all this unintelligible world," ^ 
and bring Religion and Science, the two gladia- 
torial contestants in the modern arena, to replace 
their quarrelous weapons, with which they have 
given and received gashes deep and bloody, with 
the olive branch of peace and concord. 

43 



Having undertaken to demonstrate that the 
physical world is in the embrace of laws which 
forever evolve order out of confusion, and that 
Balance is supreme in every detail of life, from 
the most momentous to the most minute, that 
throughout the length and breadth of the uni- 
verse the account balances perfectly; and that 
Nature has no failures, and bad debts; that Bal- 
ance forbids wrong, such for instance as the vic- 
tory of one force over another, the author believes 
he has found in this law the unanswerable demon- 
stration for the existence of a Supreme Being 
who is the author of Balance in the universe and 
of the immortality of the soul. Thus, having 
given to these two ambitious propositions a new 
front, he concludes he has reconciled Religion 
with Science. 

It is quite easy to reconcile enemies if they let 
you interpret their differences to suit yourself. 
Mr. Smith defines both Religion and Science 
with a view to reconciliation, and it is no wonder 
that they stop quarreling immediately. 

Even in Mr. Orlando Smith's religion, there 
is an element of the supernatural, a deus ex ma- 
china — who from the eternities rules the world 
and is pledged to see that in the end right shall 
prevail. This is theology and not science. 

Mr. Smith starts by trying to prove that Na- 
ture is just, orderly, and its accounts are always 
perfect, and then, unfortunately enough, he drags 

44 



forth once more the obsolete theological argu- 
ment which science has already rent into tatters, 
that another life is inevitable since this life is 
unsatisfactory. Having shown that there are no 
failures in. Nature, he now says, "We must ad- 
mit, however, that justice is incomplete in this 
life." That, however, destroys the position that 
Nature is at present governed by a Supreme Be- 
ing who makes failure impossible, and the propo- 
sition that this Supreme Being must be given 
more time to work in — ^an eternity — is theology, 
not science. 

If for millions of years this earth could roll 
under the eye of a Supreme Being and still be 
imperfect, what reason have we to conclude that 
the Being who has failed hitherto is going to do 
better in the unknown future? And what about 
the animals? Will they have to look forward 
to another world for justice? Must not their 
lives be "balanced" in some way too? Or will 
Mr. Orlando Smith answer with St. Paul, "Does 
God care for the oxen" ? 

Toward the end, Mr. Smith develops into a 
full-fledged pulpiteer, claiming that no hospitals, 
charities, or institutions of learning, — songs 
hymns, poems, noble thoughts or sentiments are 
possible, without the doctrine of a Supreme Be- 
ing, and of another life. Thus the science with 
which Mr. Smith began is swallowed up in the- 
ology — it is the lamb and the lion lying down 

45 



together, — ^but one inside the other. 

I had renounced Calvinism, not because it 
would not let me use my reason at all, but be- 
cause it would not let me use it consistently. I 
could use it here, but not there, or only so far and 
no further. The men who offered me substitutes 
for Calvinism placed restrictions upon reason 
too, differing only in appearance from those im- 
posed by the church. I had not yet found an 
organization that respected consistency, and con- 
sistency is another word for sincerity. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Critical Period 

In 1888 I became acquainted with the work 
of the Ethical Movement, which was then estab- 
hshing a branch in Philadelphia. The platform 
of the movement appealed to me strongly, because 
it was completely divorced from the supernatural. 
It emphasized the deed, and ignored the creed; 
or rather, it believed in the creed of the deed I 
invited the leaders of this movement to address 
my society, and to explain to us in detail the 
philosophy of Ethical Culture. All five of the 
lecturers of the Ethical Societies in America suc- 
cessively occupied my platform in St. George's 
hall, and I in return occupied their platforms in 
New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia. 
This interchange of platforms resulted in my ac- 
cepting a call from the New York Society for 
Ethical Culture, and three years later from the 
Chicago Society, which latter I served as its lec- 
turer for five years. 

The founder of the Ethical Societies was Dr. 
Felix Adler, the son of a Jewish Rabbi, who 
was expected to succeed his father as the spiritual 
head of the fashionable and wealthy Fifth Avenue 

47 



synagogue in New York City. But all the other j 
members of the fraternity of lecturers were] 
either ex-ministers of the Christian church, like 
myself, or had, at one time, studied for the 
Christian ministry. In the beginning, the move- 
ment was consistently and fearlessly Rationalistic. 
Adler had a lecture on Atheism in which he 
boldly exposed the weakness of the theistic posi- 
tion. This lecture was printed and widely circu- 
lated. The other lecturers also openly antago- 
nized the God idea as robbing the idea of the 
Good of the attention and love of man. The 
churches feared the Ethical Movement in those 
days, and denounced it as an irreligious insti- 
tution. 

But soon there appeared a change in the leader 
and founder of the movement, and gradually 
also in the majority of his colleagues. The lec- 
ture on Atheism was withdrawn from circula- 
tion, and Dr. Adler began delivering addresses 
on immortality, and exalting the character of 
Christ in the fashion of Unitarianism. All lec- 
tures in criticism of the fundamentals of Ortho- 
doxy were as much as prohibited. Orthodox 
leaders were invited to preach from the platform 
of the Ethical Societies, and it became the am- 
bition of an Ethical lecturer to deliver only such 
lectures as no church-goer would object to hear. 
I do not mean that Orthodox doctrines were pro- 
mulgated by the Ethical lecturers, but nothing 

48 



was to be said against them, if nothing could be 
said in their favon The aim of the Movement 
was now defined to be solely the improvement of 
the morals of its members and of the public, and 
therefore, like the church, it began to fight "sin," 
studiously ignoring the debasing superstitions 
and the bondage of dogma which not only had 
bankrupted, both mentally and morally, whole 
nations, but which had also withered the greatest 
civilization the world had ever seen, and sur- 
rendered humanity to the keeping of "the dark 
ages'* for a thousand years. This change in the 
program of the Ethical Societies greatly pleased 
the Orthodox world, and all fear of menace or 
danger to its theological interests from that di- 
rection was dissipated. Catholic and Protestant 
clergymen vied with each other in expressions of 
admiration for the work of the Ethical Socie- 
ties, and all praised the tact which the leaders of 
the movement displayed in refraining from criti- 
cisms of the churches and their doctrines, to pro- 
test against the degrading effects of which, was 
the very object for which the Ethical Societies 
were organized in the first place. Thus it will 
be seen how completely the Movement came to 
abandon its original program. The Sunday lec- 
tures of the leaders of the Movement became, in 
time, so "harmless" that preachers recommended 
them to their flock, while the Ethical lecturers in 
return publicly declared that it was not necessary 

49 



for a Trinitarian, a Papist or a Jew to leave his 
church before he could be admitted to mem- 
bership in an Ethical Society. The Ethical So- 
cieties, in fact, did not encourage people to break 
away from their ecclesiastical connections, but in- 
directly, at least, advised them to support the new 
movement without withdrawing their support 
from the churches to which they belonged. 

I cannot imagine that any one seriously be- 
lieved that a devout Christian, or an Orthodox 
Jew, would join an Ethical Society for purposes 
of edification in morals. To do so would be 
equivalent to an admission that one's divinely 
appointed church was not satisfying one's high- 
est needs, and to feel that way toward one's own 
church is to cease to believe in it. Only those 
then who had parted with the past, with its 
crushing and hampering freight of dogmas, 
would think of joining an organization that 
started as an ''Atheistic," or at least, a non- 
religious society. But the invitation to join the 
Ethical Societies without leaving their own 
churches had the effect of drawing the new move- 
ment into closer relations with the religious bod- 
ies, which in our opinion has greatly handicapped 
the Ethical lecturers, and impaired their leader- 
ship in the world of thought. It is not my in- 
tention to bring a charge of deliberate surrender 
to the churches against the leaders of the Ethical 
Movement. It will be difficult to find anywhere 

50 



a finer body of men than the lecturers of the dif- 
ferent Ethical Societies in America. But they 
swerved from the path they had started to fol- 
low, and sacrificed a magnificent career to be- 
come an annex to the church. Not only the his- 
tory of the Movement, but also the literature 
which it now puts forth, lends confirmatory evi- 
dence to the criticism I have made against a 
cause to which I once gave my heart. 

That the publications of the Ethical Society 
as well as the Sunday lectures of the leaders, 
show decidedly reactionary tendencies, it will not 
be difficult to prove. They do this, first, by main- 
taining a significant silence on questions the free 
discussion of which would offend the churches, 
and in the second place, by indirectly endeavoring 
to bolster up, by new interpretations, the discred- 
ited dogmas of the popular religions. Either of 
these charges, if true, will be enough to prove 
that the Ethical Movement has not remained 
faithful to its- original intentions. 

It is not a secret that the lecturers of the 
Ethical Societies no longer publicly condemn the 
false teaching of the churches. These false 
teachings, in our opinion, form an essential part 
of both Christianity and Judaism, which have 
to be exposed and attacked vigorously and with- 
out compromise, if morality is ever to make any 
permanent progress in the world. It should be 
as impossible to reconcile Ethical Culture with 

51 



the churches, as it is to reconcile theology with 
science, and yet, that is precisely what the Ethical 
lecturers think they have accomplished. I have 
only to quote from authoritative Christian 
sources to show how prejudicial to the interests 
of morality is the teaching of the churches. For 
an Ethical Movement systematically to ignore 
the evil which the churches do by sacrificing rea- 
son to dogma is in the nature of treason to its 
own principles. The v/hole trend of Christian 
teaching is that Ethics is secondary. How can 
the Ethical Societies afford to ignore so funda- 
mental an untruth? Both the established and 
the non-conformist churches explicitly and of- 
ficially declare and teach that, "They also are to 
be accursed that presume to say, that every man 
shall be saved by the Law, or the sect that he 
professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his 
life according to that Law, and the Light of 
Nature. For Holy Scripture doth set out unto 
us only the name of Jesus Christ whereby men 
must be saved.'' (^) Clearly, then, for the 
churches it is not ethics, but faith in Jesus, a 
disputed personage at the very best, which rep- 
resents the highest interests of the race. 

That the same unethical doctrine forms the 
basis of the Reformed churches will be seen from 
the following: 

"Much less can men not professing the Chris- 

(1) Eighteenth Article of the Church of England. 
52 



tian religion be saved, be they ever so diligent to 
frame their lives according to the light of nature; 
and to ascertain and maintain that they can is 
very pernicious and to be detested/' (^) 

The same indifference, if not contempt for 
moraHty is shown by the leading exponents of 
Christianity. When I was a lad of about fifteen, 
one of the books placed in my hand, and which 
I was made to regard almost as inspired as the 
Bible, was Paley's Evidences of Christianity. 
Speaking on the scope of the Christian religion, 
in the second part of his book, he writes : ''Moral 
precepts or examples, or illustrations of moral 
precepts, may be occasionally given, and be high- 
ly valuable, yet still they do not form the original 
purpose of the mission." The meaning is clear : 
Christ did not come to make men moral, he came 
to save those who shall believe in him. And 
this is also the teaching of leaders like Martin 
Luther, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon and Gen- 
eral Booth. The burden of Luther's message 
was that "Christ had come to abolish the Moral 
Law." The liberty which Luther proclaimed as- 
sured the believer that even the decalogue shall 
not be brought into account against him, "nor 
its violation be allowed to disturb the conscience 
of the Christian." (2) In the same spirit, Spur- 
geon cried in his London Tabernacle, Sunday 

(1) Westminster Catechism. 

(2) Moehler's Works, quoted by Cotter Morison, Service of 
Man, page 51. 

S3 



after Sunday, for nearly half a century : "Thirty 
years of sin shall be forgiven, and it shall not 
take thirty minutes to do it in/' And this doc- 
trine that faith in Christ can in one instant make 
a man who has led a life of crime and corrup- 
tion, one of God's saints, Spurgeon and his fel- 
low-clergymen learned from Christ himself, who 
opened the gates of paradise to the malefactor on 
the cross, and in one minute wiped out all his 
past. This example from the gospels shows that, 
the preachers and the creeds in giving to morality 
a secondary place, are not misrepresenting the 
teachings of Christ. What need has a religion 
which can change men miraculously, — and which 
makes faith the sole condition of salvation, — for 
Ethical Culture? 

What is true of Christianity is equally true of 
its parent, Judaism. The full stress of the Old 
Testament is on the necessity of the Ceremonial 
and not the Moral Law. While the Jews were 
not only permitted, but were ordered to break 
every Ethical commandment in the decalogue, 
to commit theft, murder, massacre, and acts of 
oppression and brigandage, — every departure 
from the ritual of Israel was visited by immedi- 
ate and clamorous punishment. Both Judaism 
and Christianity make their special objective, not 
character, but the creed. How, then, can a move- 
ment the motto of which is "The deed, not the 
creed/* maintain so profound a silence, or re- 

54 



frain even from calling- attention to the positive 
hurt which the old religions do to the cause of 
righteousness? What is the defense of Ethical 
Culture against this charge? 

If it be answered that, the churches no longer 
take their creeds or bibles, seriously, notwith- 
standing their official professions, then the 
Ethical lecturers should, instead of silently en- 
dorsing the hypocrisy which professes one thing 
and believes another, thunder against it with all 
their might. This should be done not from mo- 
tives of hatred or combativeness, but in the spirit 
of faithfulness to the best interests of man. It 
is error, and not its victims, against which the 
Rationalist directs his straight and sounding 
blows. It was Paine's kindly advice in the 
French convention to kill the king and spare the 
man. It is the desire of Reason to destroy false 
teachings and to help enlighten the teacher. 

The effect upon the prosperity of the Ethical 
Societies, both in America and Europe, of this 
policy of silence, has been really disastrous. Like 
Unitarianism, the Ethical Movement has drifted 
into the sheltered harbor where it hugs the 
wharves made fast by posts and ropes. Both 
these movements started out for the sea, but not 
a vessel flying their flags can now be encountered 
at any distance from the coast. Thirty years ago 
there were four Ethical Societies in America; 
there are now these same four and no more, and 

55 



three of them are without any lecturers. 

But not only by their silence on the injurious 
teachings of both Judaism and Christianity, 
which strike at the very foundations of moral 
health, but also by their attempts, incredible as it 
may seem, to discredit science and to seek in 
metaphysics, or in a sort of attenuated theology, 
the origins and sanctions of Ethics, the Ethical 
lecturers have given to decaying dogmas the sup- 
port they owed to Rationalism. 

In a contribution by Dr. Adler, head of the 
fellowship, on one of the fundamentals of the 
Movement, we see full traces of this deplorable 
effort to divorce Ethics from science, and wed 
her to theology. 

In discussing "The Religion of Duty," the pro- 
fessor, instead of explaining duty in the terms of 
science, tries to make of it a deeper mystery even 
than the thrice veiled dogmas of the churches. 
"Duty," he sa3''S, "becomes religion when we 
recognize that it is not a law or a command that 
has a merely sensible origin, or can be explained 
in terms of sensible experience, that we can get 
to the bottom of it and thoroughly penetrate it 
with our understanding, or see fully the use of 
j^ H« * * j^ is ^hen that we come to realize 
that in the moral command there is something 
awful." The language is not very clear — per- 
haps because the thought is not very clear — but 
we believe its meaning is that, a moral command 

56 



is awful because we cannot understand it. Prof. 
Adler seems to make of duty a new kind of a 
god. The qualities and attributes of the deity- 
he bodily transfers to his successor — Duty, Ac- 
cordingly, Duty becomes just as mysterious and 
awful as God, and we can no more get at the 
"bottom" of Duty than we can understand the 
Deity. Duty no more than the Deity can be "ex- 
pressed in terms of sensible experience," hence 
it is inexplicable; and the only way we can feel 
"the majesty and inexplicable augustness of it," 
says the professor, "is to draw back the curtains 
•and see," and then "we shall find that out of this 
relation we suddenly get religion." I fear we get 
it a little too suddenly. Such rapid transforma- 
tions suggest a deus ex machina. 

There is serious danger of making a fetish out 
of the word duty. The thinking world has aban- 
doned theism because of the impossibility of ex- 
plaining in terms of sensible experience, the ex- 
istence of a personal infinite ; but now Prof. Adler 
wishes to surround his new deity. Duty, with the 
same "clouds and darkness" which have so long 
hung about the ancient divinities. 

In what sense is it a compliment to the moral 
law to say that it cannot be "explained in terms 
of sensible experience" ? What is gained by 
putting a dead wall or "curtains" between the 
intelligence of man and his conscience? Why 
sneer at the scientific explanation of the origin 

57 



and growth of the moral sense by calling it ''nar- 
row, secular, materialistic and paltry,'' as Prof. 
Adler does in this lecture — when no better expla- 
nation is offered than a mere rhetorical recom- 
mendation ''to draw back the curtains and see the 
majesty and inexplicable augustness of it"? 
What are these curtains? Who put them there 
to hide such "augustness"? If the scientific ex- 
planation of the origin of the moral sense is a 
"flat failure," quoting from the professor again, 
what is his explanation? We are really grieved 
to see so influential a public leader taking sides 
against science, the only dependable teacher we 
have, notv/ithstanding its many limitations. 

Again, in his criticism of the evolutionary view, 
the professor says : "As against the scientific 
evolutionary view, I plead for what I would call 
the moral evolutionary view, which asserts that 
the moral law is a law of our nature, and in so 
far, the universal nature. ^^ ^ ^ We leave 
the issues to work themselves out ; we leave them 
to mightier powers than we, whose ways we wot 
not of." Here surely is theology — cap, cassock 
and all. 

But what is the difference between the scien- 
tific evolutionary view and the moral evolution- 
ary view? If the scientific view is not in accord 
with the known facts, then it is not scientific. 
But if it is in harmony with the facts, what do we 
gain by rejecting it in preference to the "moral 

S8 



evolutionary vievv^''? If on the other hand the 
"moral evolutionary view'' is not scientific, what 
is its value ? 

According to the generally admitted scientific 
explanation, morality is just as much the result 
of evolution as is music or language. Morality 
is the slow product of the accumulated experi- 
ence of humanity. But that does not seem to be 
Prof. Adler's theory. 'There is,'' he says, ''a 
voice that speaks in us out of the ultimate reality 
of things." But if this voice is not the inherited 
instincts of the race, what is it ? If it is a ready- 
made, or made to order voice, or a voice not 
made at all — but, well, an unfathomable some- 
thing commanding us in tones of the categorical 
imperative — who placed it there? God, or 
chance? If conscience, in straight words, is a 
natural product in the same sense that the brain 
or the human hand is, then there is no good rea- 
son for throwing a mystic veil over this one 
faculty or sense, or in decorating it with fancy 
trimmings and jingling bells in order to make 
it look exceptionally awful and august. Just as 
the foolish overpraise of Jesus has nearly ruined 
him as a living force in the life of the world 
today, so there is danger of making an idol or a 
mummy out of morality by taking away all its 
beautiful naturalness. 

"I simply think of the moral law within us," 
says Dr. Adler, "as a hand laid on us. * * * 

59 



I like to think of the moral law * * * as of 
a hand; the face we do not see, but the hand 
we feel.'' Is not this an attempt to make ethics 
as mystifying as theology? If this "hand/' of 
which the professor speaks, is endowed with un- 
erring intelligence, how shall we account for the 
missteps, disastrous in their consequences^ which 
man has taken with this "hand" laid on him ? 
If, however, this "hand" which we are told "is 
heavy upon our shoulders as Atlas," is not infal- 
lible, what is its worth? Is it necessary to per- 
plex an audience with visions of a "hand," and 
"a face that belongs to the hand which we do 
not see," in order to impress it with the beauty 
and duty of obedience to the dictates of the en- 
lightened and emancipated conscience? 

But this confusion is the result of the com 
merce of Ethical Culture with Churchianity and 
Judaism, in other words, with the supernatural. 
A teacher who is trying to convince both Chris- 
tian and Jew that without discarding their obso- 
lete and obstructive dogmas they can join the 
Ethical Movement, is compelled by the very exi- 
gencies of the mesalliance to tarry in the region 
of fog and obscurity. And this confusion in 
thought, this lack of decision and clarity in one's 
concepts, this metaphysical vagueness and bewil- 
dering rhetoric is the price Orthodoxy exacts be- 
fore it will bestow its smile upon a prodigal 
teacher seeking to return to the fold. 

60 



* 



We could not agree with the head of the 
Ethical Movement that it was worth our while 
to try to win the favor of the churches, or to 
seek their co-operation. In our opinion such a 
rapprochement would only redound to the glory 
of an institution that has proven itself not only 
incapable of saving the world, but of positively 
hindering its salvation. This indictment is not 
voiced in haste, or in malice, but because it is 
based upon careful observation and study. 

The church can never become a great moral 
power until it is rationalized. In this age of 
enlightenment the church can not be honest and 
Orthodox at the same time. We recommend this 
thought to the consideration of the Ethical lec- 
turers. And no institution can make others hon- 
est, if it is dishonest itself. Is the church honest 
with science? Is it honest with history? Is it 
honest with the Bible ? Mark these brave words 
of Huxley: 

''When Sunday after Sunday, men who pro- 
fess to be our instructors in righteousness, read 
out the statement that Tn six days the Lord made 
heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them 
is,' in innumerable churches, they are either 
propagating what they may honestly know, and, 
therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities ; or 
if they use the words in some non-natural sense, 
they fall below the moral standard of the much- 
abused Jesuit.'' 

6i 



How refreshing! 

To the average thinker the inconsistency of 
advocating Ethics as the supreme good, on the 
one hand, and on the other, of maintaining a 
dehberate silence on the demonstrably false teach- 
ing of the church which makes belief the great- 
est of all virtues, has only to be pointed out to 
be comprehended. And it is Kant, the patron- 
saint of the American Ethical lecturers, who set 
them the example of inconsistency. With a 
rigour which even in a dogmatist of the theo- 
logical schools would be considered excessive, 
Emanuel Kant argued that so imperative was the 
duty to tell the truth that, even to save one's 
self or another from murder, there must be no 
departure from it. If you saw an assassin with 
a drawn dagger running after a man or a woman, 
and he asked you, "which way the fugitive ran," 
if you answer him at all, insists Kant, you must 
tell him the truth. And yet this same philosopher 
encouraged openly the Lutheran clergy of his 
day to go on deceiving the people with beliefs 
which they themselves had discarded, on the 
score that popitlus vult decipi, and that the clergy 
are excused by their profession for playing a 
false part. (^) 

Is it then from policy or from principle that 
the Ethical lecturers, starting as they did, by de- 
nouncing the supernatural as the destroyer of 

(1) Religion innurhalf der grenzen der blossen vernunft, 
Bill, etc., quoted by J. M. Robertson. 

62 



character, later on came to ignore altogether the 
existence even of degrading superstitions, and 
were content to be a moral improvement associa- 
tion merely, somewhat after the pattern, as 
Marie- Jean Guyau states, of a Christian Tem- 
perance Society? (^) 

The battle of progress is to be fought in the 
mind. An intellectual av/akening must precede 
all real and permanent m.oral improvement of the 
world. On the tree of enlightenment alone can 
ripen the fruit of righteousness and peace. And 
there can be no enlightenment under the church. 
Even as the light of the sun can not enter a dun- 
geon, the light of knowledge can not penetrate 
the mind which it has been the aim of the church 
to keep shut. The condition of the spread of 
knowledge as of the sunlight is the same — free- 
dom. Yet freedom is anathema where there 
is a Revelation. A thousand Ethical Societies 
could not help Russia unless she began by strik- 
ing, without sparing or vv^avering, at the teachings 
of the Greek church. 

The new edifice cannot rise side by side with 
the old — it must rise on the ruins of the old. 

Can there be any real moral advance in a com- 
munity in which the following is accepted and 
taught as a divinely revealed truth: ''We are 
accounted righteous before God, only for the 
merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by 

(1) L'Irreligion de L'Avenir. 

63 



faith, and not for our own works and deservings. 
Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is 
a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of com- 
fort." C) 

Only by self-stultification can an Ethical So- 
ciety refrain from combating so injurious a 
teaching with all the earnestness and courage at 
their command. 

Nothing would please the priests and rabbis 
more than to be assured that the efforts of the 
new teachers will be confined strictly to giving 
moral exhortations, and that they will leave 
church and dogma respectfully alone. 

(1) No. XI. of the Articles of the Church of England. All 
the other Christian churches teach to young and old the 
same doctrine. 



64 



CHAPTER V 

Anchored at Last 

After nearly ten years of service in the Ethical 
field, I felt constrained to withdraw from the 
fraternity of lecturers, because I realized that 
under the guise of a new name v/e were all slowly 
slipping back into the net of theology, from which 
we had escaped after years of struggle and suf- 
fering. When I look over my own lectures de- 
livered during my connection with the Ethical 
Movement, I find in them clearly the traces of 
the same reactionary bias. The atmosphere of 
theology is perceptible on nearly every page, 
Passages about the moral supremacy of Jesus, 
His uniqueness, and the indebtedness of the ages 
to Him, will be found in the publications which 
will not only show that I had swerved from the 
path into which I had entered when I left Cal- 
vinism, and in which I had persevered against 
numerous temptations to leave it, but also, what 
a powerful influence my new environment ex- 
erted upQn me. In a lecture delivered before 
the Chicago Ethical Society, I try to prove the 
spiritual resurrection of Jesus, and His incom- 
parable greatness. In another, delivered before 

6S 



the New York Society, in Carnegie Music Hall, 
I fail to appreciate the services of such intellec- 
tual Titans as Voltaire and Thomas Paine — who 
flung themselves against a thousand abuses, and 
by opposing, succeeded in putting an end to them. 
I make these confessions to show that there was 
in my course from Calvinism to Rationalism, a 
break, after all. I missed the straight path, de- 
spite all my vigilance, and cannot, therefore, 
claim the happiness, nor the distinction which be- 
longs to those who have been more consistent 
than I have been. 

But it was not very long before I began to see 
whither I was drifting. I discovered that I was 
using two sets of weights and measures — one 
set for Calvinistic Christianity, and another set 
for my Christianity, and it was only necessary 
to submit my own interpretations to the same 
tests which had shown the untenability of 
Calvinism to discover my self-deception. I 
had rejected Calvinism because it offered no evi- 
dence in support of its dogmas, but what evi- 
dence did I offer to prove the moral superiority 
of my Jesus which I claimed to find in the gos- 
pels? Why is not Calvin's word as good as 
mine, if an assertion may pass for an argu- 
ment? I began to see, even more clearly than 
ever before, perhaps, because of my temporary 
backsliding or egarement, as the French would 
say, that it is as impossible to construct a charac- 



ter of Jesus as it is to write a life of Jesus out of 
the data in hand. No less an authority than 
Prof. Conybeare, of Oxford, Fellow of the Brit- 
ish Academy and Doctor of Theology, admits 
that *We cannot, then, aspire to write a life of 
Jesus. Even Renan failed, and from the hands 
of a Farrar we merely get under this rubric a 
farago of falsehood, absurdity, and charla- 
tanry." (^) This is strong language, but there is 
no exaggeration in it. If, however, a life of Jesus 
cannot be written, it follows that, under the cir- 
cumstances a character of Jesus can not be con- 
structed. How can the character of a man be 
known whose life is unknown to us ? Are a few 
floating aphorisms ascribed to Jesus enough to 
justify his beatification? And yet, the other 
Ethical lecturers, as well as myself, were speak- 
ing of Jesus not only as the religious genius of 
the ages, but also as the one being in whom 
humanity's hopes and dreams came true. I have 
quoted elsewhere (^) Adler's description of 
Christ as "a personality of such superlative ex- 
cellence, so radiant, so incomparably lofty in 
mien and port and speech and intercourse." But 
this rhetorical praise is as untrue of Jesus as it 
would be of Moses or Mohammed. 

In the fall of 1899 there was presented to me 
the opportunity of either going to Philadelphia, 
the scene of my earlier intellectual struggles, as 

(1) Myth, Magic and Morals, page 140. 
('}Th» Truth About Jeftus, pa^ 25<7. 



the lecturer of an Independent Society, or of re- 
turning to Chicago, after an absence of four 
years from that city, to be the lecturer of a so- 
ciety which promised to help support a platform 
pledged to an uncompromising Rationalism. 
Considerable objection was made by members and 
lecturers of the Ethical Societies to my trying 
to organize an Independent Society in Chicago. 
Was not one liberal society enough in Chicago? 
it was asked. Did not the Ethical platform 
answer the purposes which the proposed society 
wished to serve? Would I not be dividing and 
thereby weakening the cause by engaging a new- 
lecture hall? My critics did not object to my 
going to cities where there were no Ethical So- 
cieties, but in cities where there was one, I was 
not needed, was their argument. But time has 
shown that the society of which I have been the 
lecturer for the past ten years, does not in the 
least conflict with, or duplicate the work of the 
Ethical Societies. There is a radical diflference 
between Ethical Culture and Rationalism, which 
may be brought out by the help of an illustration : 

A certain king had many slaves. This king 
had been a slave-holder for a long, long time. 
And his slaves had lived in slavery ever since 
they could remember. There were among the 
slaves of the king, young and old, men and 
women, rich and poor. 

Now there came to the slave-holder, one day, 

68 



men from a strange country, who demanded that 
the slaves be given their freedom. The king 
put them to death, and continued to hold his 
slaves. From time to time others came demand- 
ing freedom for the slaves, but they met a simi- 
lar fate. Some of the preachers of freedom were 
burned at the stake, others were tortured to 
death in dungeons, and others again were put 
to the sword. But this did not stop the coming 
of new preachers of liberty. 

When the number of people believing in free- 
dom for the slave increased sufficiently to com- 
mand respect, the slave-holder changed his policy. 
He received the messengers of liberty with great 
courtesy and hospitality, and expressed the hope 
that he and they might arrive at a satisfactory 
arrangement. 

"Why do you demand the freedom of the 
slaves?'* he asked, very politely. ''It is their 
right, and it alone can develop the best possibil- 
ities in them," they answered. 

"I am perfectly willing, — indeed, I shall co- 
operate with you toward that laudible end, but 
on one condition: they shall continue to remain 
in my care and obey me as their guide and pro- 
tector." ''No," said some of the apostles of 
liberty, "as slaves they can never be helped to 
the fuller and better life. Before everything 
else, they must conquer freedom to obey not 
you, but their own unfettered and enhghtened 

69 



consciences. Besides, you have been an evil Mas- 
ter, and can no longer be. entrusted with the care 
of others. With the fall of slavery falls all your 
pretended rights to the allegiance of these men 
and women. And the slaves can not become free 
until your real character is exposed and your 
pretensions to authority divine exploded. 

But, on the other hand, there were those among 
the preachers of freedom who were inclined to 
accept the slave-owner's proposition : ''We will 
come in and do what we can to educate and re- 
form the people. We will say nothing to them 
about their slavery, or against your authority 
over them. All we wish is to make good men 
and women out of them," they said. 

Behold the difference between ''liberal" Chris- 
tian and Ethical movements, and a thorough- 
going and uncompromising Rationalism. The 
former think that the intellectual bondage of the 
church is not an obstacle to the moral and mental 
development of man, the latter hold, and to my 
mind, justly, that the first condition of salvation 
for a slave is that he be free — free from gods, 
christs, bibles and churches, as well as kings. 

But the Rationalist Societies of Europe and 
America need no justification for their existence. 
They do a work which neither Unitarianism nor 
Ethical Culture attempt even to do. The work 
of the Rationalists of Chicago has been singularly 
successful, both in building up a self-supporting 

70 



Society with a large membership and a much 
larger audience which regularly fills Orchestra 
Hall — the largest and finest on Michigan Ave- 
nue, but it has also, together with the other 
progressive forces at play in the modern world, 
profoundly influenced the life and thought of 
the community. Superstition is more ashamed 
to show her face in Chicago, than perhaps in any 
other city of its size in America. There are no 
doubt. Rationalists in many of our other cities, 
and in large numbers, but in Chicago, Rational- 
ists are organized. They maintain a regular plat- 
form, and disseminate Rationalistic publications 
by the thousands. 

The ten years in which I have been engaged in 
this work of constructive Rationalism have been 
the most fruitful years of my life. They have 
been years of conscious development in the knowl- 
edge and grasp of truths which enrich as well 
as interpret life. The sense of freedom from 
inconsistency, which is a kind of insincerity, is 
a great source, both of power and happiness. 
Then, the militant note to which the soul of the 
Rationalist vibrates, — for he is a soldier sworn 
to free men from the fear of the gods and their 
priests — a soldier to help man break his holy 
chains — gives him all the alertness, watchfulness, 
and courage of a sentinel at his vigil. There 
have been those who have helped man to political 
liberty, and others who are nobly endeavoring to 

71 



help him conquer industrial liberty: but not 
until man has thrown off the yoke of the gods 
can he be free indeed. The last king to be de- 
throned is the heavenly king. If he stays, .Tzar 
and Kaiser, tyrant and despot, pope and priest, 
in some form or other, will remain with us. 
Here and there men may succeed in banishing or 
overthrowing the tyrant, — king or priest, but 
these will come' back again and again, perhaps 
disguised, but ever really the same, until God 
from whom they derive their power is unseated, 
and man becomes forever free. Honor to those 
who taught us not to kneel before Caesar, but 
greater honor to him who shall teach us not to 
kneel at all, and to accept nothing that is given 
to us for kneeling. 



72 



CHAPTER VI. 
Some Objections to Rationalism. 

''Rationalism is cold/' is a frequent criticism 
advanced by theological people. Without God 
and the hope of immortality, the Rationalist, ac- 
cording to church-goers, ought to be very miser- 
able. Even if he should manage to escape the 
consequences of his unbelief while living, he is 
sure to suffer horrors when he comes to die. 
Life and death are so awful that only faith in 
God and the hope of a future life can enable us 
to endure the one and resign ourselves to the 
other. Such is the reasoning of Orthodoxy. 

Strictly speaking, the question of the existence 
of a God is not a human question. The bare 
fact that for these thousands of years, and 
throughout the world, the existence of God has 
remained an unsolved question, suggests that in 
all probability it will never be decided by mortals. 
Certainty about the future is equally impossible. 
Of course, we do not know what light science 
may throw upon these problems to-morrow, but 
speaking modestly, and without dogmatizing, 
every honest soul must admit, with Shakespeare, 
that the future is still an "undiscovered country.*' 

73 



The essential thing is not that we should believe 
in a God or in the hereafter, but that we should 
grow. Whenever, during my ten years of com- 
plete severance from the supernatural, I have 
been called to say a few words in the house of 
mourning, or at the open grave, I have never 
pretended to find comfort for the bereaved in the 
belief in a non-resident God or in a life hereafter. 
The priest knows, or says he does, where the 
departed has gone, what kind of a life he leads 
there, what will be his lot in eternity, and 
whether we shall meet again. He speaks of 
these things with the assurance of a schoolboy 
reciting a page which he has learned by heart. 
But he is only pretending to possess informa- 
tion which, as a matter of fact, no one possesses. 
He knows no more of a personal God, or of an- 
other life, than anybody else. If we cannot pre- 
dict what will happen in the next hour, how can 
we talk with assurance of the secrets of the un- 
ending future? If we do not quite understand 
ourselves, or the world which we daily see, how 
can we boast of any certain knowledge of a Being 
who is said to be infinitely and absolutely and 
incomprehensibly different from us? Silence is 
more religious than the gossip one hears about 
such a Being. Modesty is more reverent than 
dogmatism, and the agnostic is more honest and 
more eloquent than the garrulous preacher. If 
men wish to know where the Eternal is, who he 



74 



■ 



is, what he does, what his intentions are, how he 
should be praised, what humors or provokes him, 
how many manifestations or persons there are 
in his godhead, and when he first began his oper- 
ations, etc., they must not come to a RationaHst 
for such information. To acquaint man with 
himself, to show him the way to develop and 
use his own resources, and in time of sorrow and 
bereavement, to depend upon the thoughts of the 
wise and the brave, which heal and sooth and 
bless, is the consolation Rationalism oflfers. It 
is modest, but it is real. Rationalists cannot 
count on the creeds for consolation. A doll may 
amuse a baby, but is a grown-up man miserable 
because he cannot play with a toy ? The Ration- 
alist is willing to see Nature in its true light. 
He prefers reality to illusions, and would rather 
be awake than dreaming the most seductive 
dreams which "poppy or mandragora, or all the 
drowsy syrups of the world'' can medicine the 
mind into. 

But the greatest consolation of the Rationalist 
is in this, that he is not under obligation to dis- 
tort his intellect and twist his affections out of 
joint in order to justify God's way to man. No 
sooner a disaster is announced than the clergy 
begin to concoct excuses for this seeming neglect 
of Providence. God meant to punish human 
carelessness ; he was angry with the present gen- 
eration for its unbelief; he wished to speak in 

75 



tones loud enough to be heard the world over, 
he was trying to make us more careful in the 
future, he wished to demonstrate that all human 
devices and inventions are futile unless ''the Lord 
protect'' the ship, the house or the city; and 
finally, that we do not understand God, for ''he 
moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to per- 
form," though we know he does everything for 
the best. Is it not a welcome rehef that the 
Rationalist can bear his great sorrow without 
resorting to commonplace sophistries of this na- 
ture ? Not taxed with the burden of vindicating 
Providence, the Rationalist devotes his energies 
to the fruitful work of developing his resources 
against the fortuitous elements at play about him. 
Only a moment's reflection will prove the futil- 
ity of all attempts to establish a relation of some 
kind between God and the world's life. 

.God's in His Heaven, 
Airs right with the World! 

is Birowning's creed in his Pippa Passes. 

The verse in which the lines occur is, no doubt, 
excellent poetry, but what about its philosophy? 

''The lark's on the zving; 
The snaiVs on the thorn; 
God's in His Heaven — 
All's right with the world!" 

76 






We have seen and heard the lovely lark winging 
through the crystal air ; and a thousand thousand 
eyes have discovered the snail on the thorn. Is 
it Browning's idea to intimate that by the same 
material or tangible proofs we may be sure 
"God's in His Heaven/' and be reassured that 
''All's right with the world?" The two propo- 
sitions belong altogether to radically different 
categories, and to infer from the presence of the 
lark in the air, or the snail on the thorn, that 
"All's right with the world," may be good rhyme, 
but that is all it is. Granting that "God's in His 
Heaven," — a question toward which we main- 
tain the modest and honest agnostic position, — it 
is within the sphere of man to discuss whether 
"All's right with the world." The world is made 
up of many countries full of people, and it has 
had a long history. Certainly "all's not right" 
in all the countries of the world, nor has it been 
so during all the periods of time. Is it, for ex- 
ample, true of Russia to-day that "all's right" 
there ? Is it true of Poland, bleeding from a 
thousand wounds? Has it ever been all right 
in Turkey? In Browning's opinion, was there 
a country in Europe — the Europe of his day — of 
which he could truthfully say that all was right 
there? But perhaps the poet merely meant to 
say that since "God's in His Heaven," all is 
bound to be right, sooner or later, — if not in this 
world, then, surely, in some other. But is not. that 

77 



begging the question? The mere fact that the 
best human effort is directed toward making the 
world better, shows that the world needs mend- 
ing, and is far from being all right. We fear 
that Browning used his oft-quoted expression 
after a very enjoyable breakfast, while looking 
out upon his green and carefully trimmed lawns, 
shaded with the overspreading branches of gor- 
geous trees, and imagined that his cheerful yard 
was the world. The poet appears to correct his 
own hasty generalization when a little later he 
puts in Pippa's mouth the lines: 

'7w the morning of the world, 
When earth was nigher Heaven than now/' 

If it is true that the older the world grows, the 
farther it falls from heaven, then, it can not be 
all right with the world, even if "God's in His 
Heaven.'' And what is Browning's authority 
that the earth was nearer Heaven once than it 
is now ? Does he believe that the state of barbar- 
ism is nearer heaven than that of civilization? 
Or does he believe that man began life as an 
angel, and later became a man — a fallen man? 
It seems as if the former of the two suppositions 
represents Browning's thought, for in the fol- 
lowing lines he shows decided preference for 
the animal, the primitive, life of the world : 



''For what are the voices of birds, 
Aye! and of beasts — but words, our words? 
Only so much more sweet f' 

This is reason swallowed up in rhyme, or sense 
lost in sentiment. Why is the incoherent, in- 
stinctive exclamations of childhood, of bird and 
beast, sweeter than the ripened, rational, pro- 
gressive, word of man? Surely a bird is more 
innocent than a man, but a stone is even more 
innocent than a bird. The beast tears its victims 
to death, the tree feeds the worms ; is not a tree, 
therefore, purer than a beast? In all nature, 
there is nothing holier than man, for he alone can 
be holy. Browning seems to think that we were 
all so much better off when we were nearer the 
bird and beast, but evolution is our destiny, and 
only faint hearts cast wistful glances at the ages 
left behind. 

Finally, the great English poet seems to de- 
velop further the Asiatic fatalism of "God's in 
His Heaven, all's right with the world'' idea, 
when in Scene VL, Pippa, in her chamber, 
exclaims : 

''All service ranks the same with God — 
With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
Are we; there is no last, nor first/' 

Indeed ! Are we, then, but his puppets ? Is God 
a puppet showman ? And is this a pappet world 



which he rules? What is the educational value! 
to God of presiding over a race of puppets? ls| 
there any glory for God, as Omar Khayyam' 
suggests, in pushing back ancf forth, on a checker- 
board, mere puppets, and then shutting them up 
in a closet after he has finished with the game? 
If we are all his puppets, we cannot much care 
whether ''God's in His Heaven," or somewhere 
else, and whether or not ''All's right with the 
world." The truth is. Browning, instead of por- 
traying truth, betrays it. He sacrifices ' reason 
to imagination, and the result is failure. 

The attempts of the clergy to reconcile the 
god-idea with human suffering and wrong have 
proved equally worthless. Shortly after the dis- 
astrous Iroquois fire, in which nearly six hundred 
lives were lost, the Chicago clergy met, strange 
to say, to thank God for his tender mercies. 
Theology cuts strange capers with Reason after it 
has put out its eyes. It was of course appropri- 
ate that, not only the mourners, but the public 
in general, should observe with sober reflections 
the anniversary of a holocaust which left a great 
city in mourning. It is regrettable, however, 
that the ceremonies at the commemoration ser- 
vice assumed altogether a theological character, 
excluding thereby from participation many who 
would have derived great benefit from a purely 
human expression of sorrow and sympathy. The 
exercises opened with the singing of the well 

80 



known Hymn, Nearer, My God, to Thee, which 
was touchingly rendered by the soloist and quar- 
tet to the accompaniment of the piano. All 
music, softly and feelingly rendered, is sure to 
be impressive as well as soothing on occasions of 
this kind. But was it not a pity that some poet^s 
words, free from the theological implication, were 
not selected in place of this church hymn which 
is, after all, nothing but the ecstatic outpouring 
of a superlatively mystical soul? What does it 
mean, for instance, to be "Nearer and still nearer, 
to God" ? Did the six hundred people who mur- 
mured the words of the hymn have any clear idea 
of what they were asking fof when they sang 
''Nearer, My God, to TheeT' No doubt they 
were comforted by the hymn, but how did it differ 
from the help which the Asiatic thinks he derives 
as often as he exclaims Om Mani Padme Houm 
— "O the glorious jewel of the lotus, — amen"? 
Imagine the effect upon an American audience, 
had one of the speakers suggested that the aud- 
ience should sing the Hindoo prayer to the lotus 
instead of the Christian hymn. But why is not 
O the glorious jewel of the lotus as intelligible 
as Nearer, My God, to Thee? Would the mil- 
lions of Orientals who in sorrow and darkness 
find light in drawing nearer to the lotus, be in the 
least moved by the Christian hymn which moist- 
ened the eyes of so many in Willard Hall ? 
But why not let the Hindoo have his lotus 

8i 






prayer and the Christian his hymn ? We have no 
objection: if they cannot do without them, they 
are welcome to them. In our opinion there has 
never been a rehgion, however crude or primitive, 
but has helped some struggling soul; there has 
not been an idol, however wooden, but has an- 
swered some prayers ; not a fetish, however cheap, 
but has inspired some believer. It is with relig- 
ions as it is with houses : The poorest hut or 
shanty protects some little ones from the cold, 
the most rickety roof shields from the storm 
some shivering child of want — even the hole in 
the ground into which the savage creeps to es- 
cape the ravages of the elements is a refuge. But 
true as all this is, it still remains as the most 
religions duty of man to try to replace these 
primitive shelters by building, as Oliver Wendel 
Holmes suggests, '^more stately mansions'' for 
his soul. Even as liberty with little is better 
than slavery with prosperity, and as justice is 
more precious than peace, truth is better than all 
the consolations which such financial exclama- 
tions as O the glorious jewel of the lotus, or 
Nearer, My God, to Thee, can afford. 

"We thank Thee, O God, for the gift of tears ; 
we thank Thee for the ministrations of pain," 
prayed the reverend comforter. Pain and tears 
are certainly among man's teachers, but they have 
not been an unmixed good. Pain has crushed, 
perhaps, as many souls as it has educated. How 

82 



many have come and gone to whom pain was 
simply pain, and who derived no benefit from it 
whatever? A dispatch from Port Arthur states 
that "the inmates of the hospitals complain bit- 
terly of the heartlessness of the doctors and sis- 
ters of charity, who have become so accustomed 
to human suffering during the long siege that 
they have lost all sympathy with their patients." 
Pain, then, can make people callous as well as 
sensitive; it can break the spring of the heart 
as well as sting the will into action. 

But it is not our purpose, at present, to ques- 
tion the wisdom of being specially and officially 
''grateful for the ministrations of pain" ; our ob- 
ject is to inquire what the officiating clergyman 
meant when he said, "We thank Thee, O Father, 
etc." Did he mean it was good of the Deity to 
visit us, now and then, with such catastrophes as 
the Iroquois theatre fire ? or, did he mean that it 
was quite considerate of him to make us feel the 
horror of that event sufficiently as to bring tears 
from our eyes? In thanking the Lord for pain 
as a gift, are we to understand that we owe it 
solely to his loving kindness that we can suffer, 
and not to any merit on our part? To thank 
anybody for anything implies the receiving of a 
favor, and is it this clergyman's idea that in send- 
ing pain and suffering — earthquakes and floods 
and terrible fires which in one black hour destroys 
the lives of dearest children with their helpless 

83 



parents or guardians — the Deity is doing us a 
favor ? 

Let us reflect a moment: *'We thank Thee, 
O Father, etc.," Does this mean that there was 
'^a possibihy of the Lord withholding from us the 
ministrations of pain," and that, therefore, we 
must be thankful to him for not doing so — for 
not letting us be like the angels who live in a 
world free from evil and error? We cannot 
understand what the reverend doctor means when 
he publicly thanks the Deity for the "ministra- 
tions of pain." And will our good neighbor (^) 
tell us who he meant by ''O Father," and 
how he connects this '' Father " with the 
unutterable calamity, the shadow of which 
still darkens our human hearts? Ah, let us be 
truthful. We are soldiers, and illusions can only 
spoil us. '*We had sinned together," continued 
the Reverend, ''at least someone had sinned, and 
'let him without sin cast the first stone.* I have 
not the heart to recriminate now, as I had not 
then, beecause in my ow nconscience I stand con- 
victed before God of the common negligence. 
We are common sinners." What do these words 
mean? Is the good doctor trying to exonerate 
God by laying the entire blame upon us "common 
sinners" ? 

The theatre fire was in all probability started 
by an accident which, in the absence of efficient 

(*) Reverend Lloyd Jones. 



management on the stage and in the auditorium, 
spread rapidly, converting the building in a few 
moments into a charnel-house. Why bring the 
Deity into the affair? What part, according to 
the doctor, did the Deity play in the Iroquois 
fire? Did he try to save anybody? Did he try 
to prevent anybody from being rescued ? Did he 
cause the accident ? Did he put it into someone's 
mind to be careless ? Did he confuse the people 
and throw them into a panic purposely? Did 
he fold his hands and stand aside to see the burn- 
ing? Did he wish to help but could not for any 
moral reasons? Did he regret his inability to 
prevent the horror? or was he glad it happened 
because it would teach us a lesson? Did he 
choose that special way of teaching us a lesson? 
Had he inevitable reasons for selecting a Wed- 
nesday matinee, when more children would be 
present, to punish ''us common sinners, who stand 
convicted before God." If we cannot answer 
any of these questions, why do we connect God 
with the affair? If we cannot say just what God 
did or did not do in the theatre fire, why talk 
about it? If this calamity came upon us be- 
cause of our sins, then, according to the mission- 
ary the Martinique earthquake came because the 
islanders rejected the Protestant religion. And 
whose sins was God punishing by the Galveston 
disaster or the Armenian massacres? Has it 
come to this that a man cannot take a sorrowing, 

85 



weeping, heart-mangled brother or sister by the 
hand with sincere and sweet pity, without specu- 
lating about the Deity and his mysterious moves ? 

Rationalism saves us from all these contradic- 
tions, and gives us the consolation of being sane, 
even when we cannot have our heart's desire. 

But to abstain from the worship of unknown 
beings, does not mean to go through life without 
an ideal. The feeling of longing, which the poet 
tells us is ''of all the moods of mind, the dearest,'' 
is present in every earnest man and woman. To 
develop our faculties, to accomplish our tasks, to 
realize our hopes, to reach after our best 
thoughts — to labor for the beautiful yet-to-be — 
it is this hope which gives atmosphere to life, and 
makes our prattle eloquent. The pursuit of the 
ideal, the vision of a world void of wrong, of a 
humanity free and strong, of a world sweetened 
by the harmony of happy lives, of honest loves, 
of great worth, of innocent joys, — will ever draw 
us like a loving kiss. 

Another objection marshalled against Ration- 
alism is that it is too critical, and that it is not 
"nice" to criticise. "Criticism,'' it is argued, 
"dwells upon the things which separate, more 
than upon those which bring together races and 
creeds." 

It certainly is more pleasant to talk of the 
unities and the fraternities, instead of the differ- 
ences between men or their views and ideals. 



Unity is a fine thing, but when it is used as a 
shibboleth, or as a check upon the freedom of 
thought and speech, it ceases to be desirable. 
When agreement is the product of unhampered 
and generous research, it is good; but when it 
is desired as an excuse for the fear to investi- 
gate, then it becomes a cover for error, or a plea 
for peace and harmony at the cost of truth and 
growth. The teacher who provokes thought 
through criticism is a greater helper than he who 
by repeating set phrases never awakens a new 
interest in us. To sacrifice everything for the 
sake of peace and fraternity would be a loss 
rather than a gain. In Russia, for instance, one 
has all the freedom in the world, provided, he 
will speak only well of the government. There 
would, indeed, be harmony under these condi- 
tions, in any camp, but what would it be worth ? 
"Look at my charities," says the Catholic church 
— "my art, my music — the magnificent cathe- 
drals I have built, which are like beautiful gal- 
leries. Is it right to criticise or condemn the 
evil practices of a church that has done so much 
good for civilization ? Speak, then, of the good 
the church has done, and say nothing of her per- 
secutions and superstitions, and we will all be of 
one accord and of one mind." But would such a 
compromise, though baptised with the high- 
sounding name of unity, help the cause of pro- 
gress? Is not progress a dearer word than 

87 



unity? Is not freedom more precious than 
peace? Let us have unity if we can, but we 
must grow, and we must be free. Shall we sell 
the truth that we may have money to be cV; r- 
itable with? Is it right to sacrifice speech to 
silence, for the sake of harmony? 

But is it nice to criticise ? Is it not more gen- 
erous and aesthetic to be on good terms with 
everybody? What is there more desirable, they 
say, than to see the ministers of the various cults 
— the Catholic priest, the Protestant divine, the 
Jewish rabbi, the Unitarian minister, the Ethicist 
and Revivalist, arm in arm, and on the same 
platform, exchanging courtesies and praising one 
another's work? We are told that when we see 
such a gathering on one platform, we can be 
sure that the millenium has arrived. But it will 
be a millenium for the priest and the rabbi, the 
healer and the shouter — they are the only ones 
who' will be benefited by such a Pentecostal as- 
semblage. Such fellowship will no doubt throw 
its mantle of silence over a great many evils 
which fear the light, and encourage their authors 
to be defiant and indifferent to the truth. Where 
there is silence truth has no advantage over error. 
Is it worth while to sacrifice the most sacred 
privileges of men in order to bring priest and 
rabbi together? 

A great cause is often lost from the desire of 
its sponsors to be ''nice." The teacher who wants 

. 88 



to be ''nice'' may manage not to tell any lies, but 
he never succeeds in telling any truths, either. 
He cannot afford to tell the truth, for it may 
hurt, and he is not ''nice" if he hurts. When 
he cannot tell anything pleasant, he must hold 
his tongue. Such a teacher is like an acrobat 
dancing on a tight rope, all he can do is to save 
himself from falling. There is no more room 
in modern society for a teacher who is afraid to 
hurt than there is for the physician who would 
rather humor the patient than do his duty. And, 
yet, there are not a few who trim their thoughts 
so as to make only friends. If the whole truth 
should at any time escape them by accident, they 
hasten forthwith to qualify it, or to take back a 
part of it — just to be obliging and nice. There 
has never been a reformer in the world who 
could not have become the idol of the people by 
following such a method; but idols die and turn 
to dust, while the heroism of the martyred soul 
is a perennial benediction. 

To be "nice" was never the policy of a really 
earnest man. If Jesus was a historical person- 
age, it does not appear on the records that he ever 
tried to be "nice" — to pat the priests on the back, 
or to tell them what good fellows they were, and 
that when he and they met they should be careful 
to speak only of the things they agreed upon. 
Of course the inability to be "nice" cost Jesus 
his Hfe. His independence nailed him to the 

89 



cross, but evidently he prized something else 
more than he did unity. Luther was not very 
"nice" when he tore the pope's bull in pieces, and 
nailed his challenge to Rome on the church doors 
where everybody could see it. How impolite! 
That, surely, was a poor way to make friends. 
"Let us have masculine men," cries Emerson, 
who was himself thrown out of his pulpit and 
his church, because he preferred independence 
to popularity. 

Another thing which the independent teacher 
does which is not "nice" is that he takes away 
the religion of our mothers. What about taking 
away the religion of heathen mothers? Why is 
it right to take away the religion of a Chinaman 
— a religion handed down to him by his mother 
— and wrong to disturb the religion of an Amer- 
ican because it was his mother's religion? Did 
not Protestantism take away from the Catholics 
the religion of their mothers ? Did not Catholics 
take away from the pagan Romans the religion 
of their mothers? Is it only taking away the 
religion of our mothers that is not "nice"? 

But the Rationalist is also charged with being 
negative and not positive. We are told in sono- 
rous language that man cannot live on negations. 
But it is Orthodoxy that is negative, not Ration- 
alism. The first commandment in the Bible God 
ever gave man was a negative one: "Thou 
shalt not eat of the tree of knowledge of good 

90 



and evil.'' It denied man freedom, and science. 
It denied him the right to progress. And ever 
since the one aim of the church has been to keep 
man "poor in spirit". Rationalism, on the con- 
trary, removes the angel with the flaming sword 
at the gates of Eden, and invites everyone who 
hungers for knowledge to enter and eat of the 
tree of life. 

To know that a thing is not true, is also truth. 
The mind, like the ground, must be plowed and 
cleared before it can receive the truth. There 
can be no truth without the destruction of error. 

"Your doctrine is well enough for the strong, 
but the weak must have crutches to walk at all, 
and you take away from them their crutches," 
is another criticism often advanced against the 
Rationalist. It is related that Mr. IngersoU, 
when he called one day to see his friend, Mr. 

, who was an invalid, was confronted with 

an argument he was unable to meet. "As I was 
sitting in my invalid's chair," began his friend, 
"and was looking out of the window, I saw a 
feeble, old man, struggling up the hill yonder, 
upon his crutches. Evidently, he was in pain, 
for he moved with extreme care and leaned 
heavily upon his crutches. I could tell that his 
crutches were all that sustained him from utter 
collapse. Then I saw a young man run after 
him, and when he came up to where the old man 
was, he kicked off his crutches, and the poor 

91 



fellow rolled down the hill, a perfect wreck." 
"That was an outrage," Ingersoll exclaimed 
jumping to his feet and walking toward the win 
dow. "Where is he?" he asked, impatient with 
indignation. 

"You are that man," returned his friend. **1 
was once a believer ; my beliefs comforted me. 
You came into -my life, kicked off my crutches, 
and now I sit here in this chair, a desolate and 
hopeles soul, waiting for the flame to blow out." 

There is no more comparison between a totter- 
ing man leaning upon his wooden crutches, and 
a religion claiming to appeal to the intellect of 
man, than there is between a watch and a uni- 
verse, to quote Paley's famous argument for the 
existence of a God. But, at any rate, is it not 
cruel to knock an old man's crutches from under 
him? Let us see. If the old man with the 
crutches represents the feeble-minded believers, 
the question to be answered is, how did thy come 
to depend upon the use of crutches in the first 
place? Was it not more cruel to teach them to 
depend upon crutches ? Are not those who pre- 
vent the healthy development of the limbs to 
enhance the sale of crutches even more cruel 
than those who despise their use? To bring a 
man to a state of dependence; to terrorize him 
into fear ; to fetter his faculties so that he cannot 
train them into service; to arrest his evolution; 
to keep him a dwarf, clinging like a scared child 

92 



ii 



to the apron strings of his lords ; to place in his 
hands an icon or a crucifix as his only hope — 
and then to denounce the teachers who rob these 
poor people of their crutches, is an argument 
which is bound to recoil with fearful force upon 
the venders of such artificial helps. It is like 
depriving a man of house and goods, and then 
providing a tattered tent for his shelter, and then 
saying to us : Would you be so cruel as to pull 
down the only thing that protects his poor head 
from the elements? Yes! in order that v/e may 
awaken in him a sense of the wrong and the 
oppression and the deprivation of which he is 
the unconscious victim. Sir Henry Main, in his 
Popular Government, says, that, if it had been 
put to a vote whether machinery, when it was 
first invented, should be introduced into the fac- 
tories, there would have been recorded an over- 
whelming vote against its use. It was taking 
away from the poor man his crutches to compel 
him to compete with the iron and steel. And, 
actually, laborers of the time, suffered much and 
were driven to the wall, by the invention of 
machinery. But the temporary mischief caused 
by the introduction of machinery has been fully 
compensated by its lasting benefits to all classes. 
Likewise, this or that believer may fall and hurt 
himself when his theological crutches have been 
taken away from him, but if thereby his children 
and the future race can be taught to dispense 

93 



with the use of so clumsy a contrivance, alto- 
gether — who would hesitate to knock them off? 
Was man meant to be an invalid all his life? 
Must all the generations of the future limp and 
hobble, to support the crutch industry? 

Moreover, if any invalid can be made to give 
up his crutches, that very fact shows that he 
did not need them. Grandma, or grandpa, must 
not be disturbed in their beliefs, we hear people 
argue. We cannot disturb them, however hard 
we may try, unless they are intellectually virile 
enough to keep themselves together without 
crutches. The very fact that we can shake a 
man, shows he is strong enough to stand the 
strain. We cannot induce an invalid to give up 
his crutches; when we can, then, he is not an 
invalid. And what do we give in place of the 
crutches? — the ability to do without them. 

I have often been asked "Why do we not as a 
Rationalist Society do works of charity, such as 
establishing neighborhood guilds, sewing and 
bathing clubs for the poor, free dispensaries, 
and hospitals?" There are many who are al- 
ready doing this kind of work whatever its value 
may be, but very few who are even attempting 
to do the work which we have set out to do, 
namely, to help men to use freely and wisely the 
noblest of all their gifts — Reason. Is that a work 
that can be dispensed with? And can public 
baths, and evening classes do more for a man 

94 



than they will for an animal if his Reason is still 
fettered. The emigrant from Russia, or Italy, or 
Ireland, may join all the guilds and frequent all 
the night schools, and still remain a mental slave. 
But he can not take a course in Rationalism, and 
continue to cling to his chains. Of course, to 
make men free and enlightened is not enough. 
They must also be helped to develop the human- 
ities which are the salt of life, but we must first 
wake him up, for he can not be saved in his sleep. 



95 



CHAPTER VII. 

Rationalism and the World's Great 
Religions. 

Rationalism does not attack the religions of 
the world, it tries to explain them. But religions 
do not wish to be explained, and consequently 
they denounce the investigator as an enemy of 
morals as well as of religion. Reason, the theo- 
logians contend, is incapable of understanding 
the divine mysteries, and forgets, of course, that 
faith alone can discover the hidden things of 
God. But they do not stop to think that they 
are reasoning even when they are giving reasons 
why we should not reason. 

Beginning with the belief in God, which is the 
basic belief in nearly all religions, Rationalism 
endeavors to show the unreasonableness of all the 
dogmas which deal with the supernatural. It 
is impossible to talk about an infinite person with- 
out making one's self utterly unintelligible, not 
to say, absurd. There is not a single statement 
made about a god, which can be harmonized with 
sense. It is because the beliefs about the super- 
natural cannot be reconciled with reason, — it is 
because of the apparent absurdity of the dogmas 

96 



of religion, that thie clergy have had to resort to 
fire and blood, — the scourge, the dungeon, the 
rack, the gallows, and hell-fire to force people 
to believe in them. 

There is no reliable record of God ever being 
seen by man. His voice has never been heard. 
His form and expression or whereabouts remain 
a mystery to this day. We have nothing but 
guesses as to the kind of worship he prefers, or 
why he should be praised. And yet, entire coun- 
tries have been plundered, pillaged, and laid 
waste for no other reason than that they held dif- 
ferent views from ours on the form or nature of 
a God w^hom no man has ever seen, heard or 
comprehended. Such is the extraordinary folly 
of man ! 

All religions are absolutely human in origin. 
There is not, and there has never been, and in 
the nature of things there never can be a divine 
or superhuman religion — that is to say, a religion 
invented by a god. 

Let us imagine for the sake of argument, how- 
ever, that a god wished to reveal himself to us. 
What would be the probable course he would 
pursue? Would he reveal himself to us as he 
is, or only as much of himself as we needed to 
know or could comprehend? To reveal himself 
to us as he is in all the fulness of his nature 
would be a moral impossibility, for the reason 
that only a god could fully comprehend a god. 

97 



But if he revealed to men only as much of him- 
self as they could grasp, then their knowledge 
of him must necessarily be imperfect. We are 
revealing ourselves to the animals, for instance, 
every day of our life, but still the animals, owing 
to their limitations, can never know us as we 
are, but only as they think we are. Likewise 
our knowledge of supernatural beings must be 
as incomplete as is the knowledge of animals 
concerning man. We see objects as the structure 
of our eyes permits us to see them, or as our 
minds grasp them. The reflection of the sky in 
a drop of dew is limited to the capacity of the 
dew. Owing to this adaptation of objects to the 
powers of the observer before they can be ob- 
served at all, it may be said that objects are seen 
not as they really are but as they appear to the 
observer. Since, then, a divine revelation can- 
not overcome the limitations of the finite mind, 
God could be no more to us than what we think 
he is, or in other words, what we make him to be. 
Another proof that man is the maker of his 
own gods is that his gods are neither better nor 
worse than he is himself. The barbarian can 
never conceive of a civilized diety; on the con- 
trary, the Great Spirit he worships is a projection 
of his own passions and aspirations — his own 
vices and virtues. As he advances in refinement 
and humanity, his God advances too. If he sinks 
into deeper ignorance and brutality, he drags his 

98 



God down with him. The God of the Quaker 
is peaceful ; that of the Hebrew was a "man of 
war/' The God of the Negro, who has never 
seen white folks, is necessarily black. The God 
of children is a child-god ; and in a society where 
man, not woman, is the ruler, God is a ''he/' 
-Not only is man the maker of his gods, but he 
also keeps them in repair — constantly remodeling 
or retouching them in order to preserve some sort 
of correspondence between himself and his gods. 

And why is the god of the Negro black ? Be- 
cause he not only is ignorant of any other color, 
but because black is for him the color of prefer- 
ence or aristocracy. When he becomes acquaint- 
ed with white people he associates their color 
with everything that he fears and despises. He 
therefore, as a later evolution, makes his devils 
white. The idea I wish to present is that just 
as man determines the color of his gods and 
devils he determines also their characters. He 
can only invest them with such virtues and vices 
as he is acquainted with. He can not attribute 
to them powers w^hich he does not covet for him- 
self. In short he is the maker of the gods he 
worships and the devils he fears. 

The pathetic part of all this, however, is that 
though man makes his own gods, he imagines 
that the gods have made him. He manufactures 
an image or an idol, invests it with certain at- 
tributes and powers, and then, like a slave, falls 

99 



down to bite the dust before his own handiwork. 
Reflect upon this for a moment: The Pope^ for 
instance, owes every one of his prerogatives to 
the very people who bend before him ; they make 
him infalHble, they seat him on a throne, and 
place the Keys of Heaven and Hell in his hands ; 
yet before this creature of their own vanity or 
fear they behave like a race of bondsmen. Who 
created the Sultan or the Czar ? Their own sub- 
jects! And yet see how these Turks and Rus- 
sians creep and crawl before the work of their 
own hands. Is it not absurd for a potter to 
worship his own pot? In view, therefore, of 
the undeniable fact that man makes the gods he 
worships, how pitiable to observe the servility 
and stupidity with which he plays the sycophant 
before the images of his own hand or head! 

Notwithstanding this self-evident truth that all 
religions are human in origin, every one of them 
has claimed to be from above. Like puffed-up 
or ungrateful children, the religions of the world 
have denied their real, though humble parentage, 
and have laid claim to a celestial birth. But the 
fact that each of the great religions, while claim- 
ing a supernatural origin for itself, vehemently 
denies it to all others, renders all such claims 
exceedingly suspicious. It would be easier for 
me, for instance, to believe that God has also 
spoken to you, if he has really spoken to me. 
But if he has not spoken to me, I am apt to con- 

ICX) 



sider the claim that he has spoken to you, as an 
impertinence. The reason one ^^inspired" teacher 
calls another "an imposter" is that he is not sure 
of his own inspiration. He judges others' pre- 
tensions to a divine origin by his own. ( I ) The 
refusal of the dififerent religions to believe in 
one another is a strong proof that they are all 
equally unworthy of belief, as far as their super- 
natural claims are concerned. 

The reluctance of the prophets to believe in 
one another shows how difficult it is for us to 
ascertain to which of them the revelation has 
been made. The only way a special revelation 
could be given would be through an individual — 
a Moses, a Mohammed, a Jesus, etc. But if we 
ourselves are not inspired, how are we to tell 
which teacher is telling the truth ? If we are to 
use our own reason to decide this momentous 



(1) Cato used to say that he was surprised one soothsayer 
could keep his countenance when he saw another manipulating, 
knowing as he did the imposture he was practicing. 

Jesus is reported by John the evangelist to have denounced 
all who preceded his as "thieves and robbers." — Gospel 
according to John. 

There is a Hindoo legend that Krishna, the son of God, 
once showed himself to a group of young ladies who were 
so charmed with his handsome face and figure that not only 
did each of the young ladies wish to dance with him, but each 
insisted that no one else should enjoy the same privilege, 
whereupon Krishna found himself in an embarrassing posi- 
tion. He was willing enough to dance with the girls, but did 
not wish to inflame their jealously, so calling upon his re- 
sources, he immediately multiplied himself into as many 
Krishnas as there were maidens, and danced with each and 
every one of them, taking pains however to leave the im- 
pression with each young woman that she alone had danced 
with the god. So each religious prophet imagines that the 
Lord has not danced with anybody but himself. 

lOI 



question, why, then, do we need a revelation? 
Tell me, I pray you, was it fair in God to have 
expressed himself privately to some individual, 
and then to have left it to us to decide whether 
said individual was or was not inspired? 

And a revelation, the truth or untruth of which 
has to be ascertained by the exercise of human 
reason can claim no superiority to human reason. 
It follows then unmistakably that a revelation is 
impossible since it is we who have to decide 
whether or not it is a revelation. Even as we 
create the gods, we create also the bibles of the 
world. 

Besides the ostensible purpose of a revelation 
is to make things clear, or to change our igno- 
rance into knowledge. Have the different 'rev- 
elations of the world done this ? Have they not, 
on the contrary, added to the perplexities of the 
mind? A god who reveals himself to an individ- 
ual privately and then leaves it to us to decide 
whether said individual has or has not received 
a revelation instead of relieving, increases our 
embarrassment. 

If it be argued that we should have faith, I 
answer in which one of the prophets? Shall 
we have faith in the one our parents believed, in 
the one of the coimtry we were born in, in the 
one who agrees with us, or in the one who can 
force us to accept him? 

Moreover, if faith can make one prophet in- 

102 



spired, why not another? If faith can make 
Jesus divine, why not Mohammed? 

It is our purpose to show that neither gods nor 
revealed reHgions can be a proper subject of 
study, and what cannot be a subject of study 
cannot be an object of faith. We do not deny 
the gods, for we know nothing about them to be 
able to make any reasonable statement concern- 
ing them ; we simply dismiss them from our 
thought. 

But while the supernatural has no interest for 
the Rationalist, he is very much interested in the 
interpretations which men have given of it, and 
the manner in which they have built up a system 
of morals and a philosophy of hfe upon it. The 
great teachers and founders of religions are prop- 
er subjects both for criticism and commendation. 
Being men they cannot claim immunity from a 
free and fearless examination of their teachings. 
The more honest a teacher is, the more willing 
he is to be investigated, and nothing prejudices 
us more against a teacher than his refusal to be 
questioned. '/He who will have no judge but 
himself, condemns himself,'' says the proverb. 

But to regard these teachers as men, only, is 
to divest them also of all the magical powers 
which a fond credulity has ascribed to them. A 
teacher who seeks converts to his religion by 
curing a horse, as Zoroaster is supposed to have 
done, or by changing a stick into a serpent, as 

103 



Moses claims he did, or water iHto wine, as 
Jesus is believed to have done, instead of saving 
the world, degrades it. We insult our teachers 
when we ascribe to them miraculous powers such 
as walking on the water, multiplying loaves 
and raising the dead. All the wonders of the 
world cannot make what is bad, good, or what 
is false, true. A teacher who has a falsehood 
which he wishes to pass for the truth may resort 
to a miracle; but why should an honest soul 
undertake to win converts by unintelligible per- 
formances? If physical and mathematical truth 
can, unaided, command universal assent, why 
should there be "signs and wonders" to maintain 
moral or intellectual truths? Moreover, if a 
teacher has power to stop the sun, has he not the 
power to make people see the truth without a 
miracle? If he can raise the dead, can he not 
lift the human mind out of error without the aid 
of extraordinary phenomena ? Resorting to mir- 
acles to convert people, proves, not the power, 
but the despair of the teacher. He who can 
command followers relying solely upon the truth 
of his teaching is, and remains forever, a greater 
moral and intellectual force than he who is driven 
to surprise and bewilder his hearers before he 
can convert them, (i) 

And now before we can make an estimate of 

(1) To aim to convert a man by miracle is a profanation of 
the soul. — Emerson. 

104 



the world's leading religions, we must try to ar- 
rive at some sort of an agreement as to what we 
would consider the greatest virtue, and what the 
greatest vice in religion. 

There will be no objection, on the part of my 
readers, to the statement that the most heinous 
of all vices in any religion is cruelty. There 
is not a crime or an error which is not made 
worse by cruelty — or softened by the absence of 
it. Cruelty is the most inexcusable, the most 
inhuman, the most unreasonable, the most de- 
grading, and the most deadly of the vices that 
human nature is heir to. Cruelty is consummate 
wickedness. It is the passion of the bad be- 
cause it is bad. It is doing evil from pleasure, 
Think, then, what a serious thing it is for a 
religion purporting to be ''divine'' to recommend 
the halter, the fire-brand and the sword, for 
instance, against all who do not subscribe to its 
dogmas. With such a religion in force, it will 
not be necessary to invent a devil, for man, him- 
self, under its influence, must develop into a 
fiend of hate and cruelty, withering all he comes 
in contact with, as the frost blackens all it bites. 

It is admitted that there is an element of cru- 
elty in almost all the religions of the world; — 
though of Buddhism it has been claimed that 
during its nearly twenty-five centuries of exist- 
ence, it has not killed, much less tortured a single 
human being in the name of religion. That is 

105 



certainly an enviable record. It should compel 
the hot flush of shame to the cheek of those per- 
secuting Faiths which have shed enough human 
blood ''to incarnardine the multitudinous seas/' 

As Buddhism is one of the numerically strong- 
er religions of the world, and as it has helped- 
to shape the beliefs and practices recommended 
by the more recent creeds, a brief examination 
of its fundamental doctrine would assist us in 
making an estimate of its moral worth and may be 
useful to this discussion. What is the teaching 
which makes of Buddhism a distinctive religion? 
Life is an evil, taught the Hindu reformer. To 
desire life is the acme of immorality according 
to this doctrine for it is to desire that which is 
evil. Desire is the soil in which spring up all 
the noxious w^eeds which choke to death the 
flower of happiness. To cease to desire is to 
conquer freedom from suffering. Salvation ac- 
cording to Buddhism consists in winding up and 
sealing forever the book of life, leaving not the 
remotest possibility for any fresh life to spring 
up again. This pessimism, which while it has 
attractions for the speculative and supine Orien- 
tal, is justly abhorred by the creative and ever- 
youthful European. The important question is 
not, 'Ts life worth living?" but ''How can life be 
made worth living, since live we must?" While 
therefore Buddha taught a scrupulous morality, 
while his own character stands out as one of the 

io6 



noblest, and while his teachings have made count- 
less millions gentle and peaceful, nevertheless, 
there is in this mildest of religions, much that is 
positively harmful. The Buddhist conception of 
life with its blighting pessimism which recom- 
mends non-resistance to evil, has emptied a con- 
tinent of its vigor and converted it into a desert. 
The teaching of orthodox Buddhism may be 
likened to the advice w^hich a sea captain, driven 
by despair, might give to his men on deck — to 
sink the ship in order to escape the storm. Then 
again the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation as 
an endless chain , of nightmares, dragging man 
through unending births to '^the vast void night," 
has caused untold agony of mind and body. This 
gloomy view has made life, for millions of people, 
a misfortune, love a crime, and the earth, a hell ! 
The believers in transmigration or reincarna- 
tion forget that the scientific view of man leaves 
no room for anything to migrate. What science 
understands by soul is the word which expresses 
the functions, including brain activity and the 
circulation of the blood. When these cease there 
is no soul to go anywhere. Neither could rein- 
carnation produce the moral discipline claimed 
by its advocates. It is no punishment to return 
to the world in a lower form of life, since there 
is no memory, clear and ringing, of a former and 
higher existence. Moreover, the lower forms of 
life are more callous and not at all conscious of 

107 



deflection from a better standard. If a cruel 
man becomes a tiger, it would be giving him a 
better chance to be more cruel. Unless the ani- 
mal can remember his humanity, he can not be 
disciplined by a descent into a lower stage of 
being. . 

But the Buddhist hell, fearful though it is, is, 
fortunately, not everlasting. Over its gaping 
mouth is spread the rainbow arch of Nirvana, 
that is to say, deliverance for all from every form 
of suffering, in sleep — eternal sleep, which will, 
some day, according to this religion, fold an 
aching world on its cool and calm bosom. 

The vice of Buddhism then is its exaggeration 
of the troubles of Hfe — its deprecation of the 
opportunities for the pursuit of truth and good- 
ness which life offers. By dweUing too long and 
too often upon the thorns, Buddhism becomes 
blind to the rose which is as real as the thorns. 
And again this Oriental teacher set up an un- 
attainable ideal when he demanded the eradica- 
tion of all desire from the human soul. Man 
can only change his desires; he cannot cease to 
desire. Not to desire is also a desire — a desire 
to be free from desire. 

The virtue which we admire most in Buddha's 
doctrine is gentleness. Buddha is said to have 
been of all great leaders the most compassionate. 
He trembled to cause pain to the least of sentient 
things. The birds, the fishes, the crawling 

io8 



worms, as well as man, he looked upon as his 
brothers. Buddhism might be called the Religion 
of Pity. There is little doubt but that wherever 
Buddhism triumphed there war and persecution, 
two of the most abominable institutions of all 
time, practically disappeared. 

It is with feelings of undivided admiration that 
I now come to speak of Confucius — the only 
Rationalist among the immortals of ancient times. 
If the other founders of Faiths owe their reign 
over the minds of men, in part at least, to the 
wonderful miracles attributed to them, Con- 
fucius, on the contrary, owes his increasing repu- 
tation to the complete absence of the supernatural 
from his life and doctrines. He has conquered 
the ages by his common sense. And his sanity 
assures for him a future which we can not safely 
predict for the others. 

Omitting a historical sketch of the great Chi- 
nese teacher, and confining ourselves briefly to 
an exposition of his philosophy or religion, we 
notice at once that Confucianism devotes itself 
exclusively to this world — to the now and here. 
This is very remarkable when we remember how 
all the other teachers made the world to come, 
that is to say, some invisible and undiscovered 
world the principal theme of their preaching. 
To lose this world that we may win the next was 
the burden of the teaching of both Buddha and 
Jesus. But the great Chinaman completely ig- 

109 



nored the so-called next world, and directed all 
his efforts toward the enlightenment of man con- 
cerning the world that now is. It will readily 
be seen what a radical difference there is between 
Confucius and his colleagues. When they spoke 
of gods, Confucius spoke of man; when they 
asked for faith, Confucius recommended knowl- 
edge; when they delivered mysteries, Confucius 
presented facts. With perfect propriety we may 
call Confucius the first apostle of secularism. 
Now secularism is the very opposite of super- 
naturalism, and as the world is becoming more 
and more secular, that is to say, practical and 
humanitarian, Confucius is the only one among 
the great sages who is as much modern as he is 
ancient. 

In the teaching of Confucius we do not find 
the least suggestion of even so much as a Bud- 
dhist hell. The religion taught by Confucius is 
the least theological of any Oriental cult^ Con- 
fucius was a teacher, not a priest. He worked 
no miracles, delivered no inspired oracles, dealt 
in no mysteries, claimed no supernatural powers, 
did not think that the less sense there was in a 
religion the more divine it would be, and made 
no attempt to allure with future promises, or to 
frighten with hell-fire his hearers. In the long 
annals of a past musty with age and choking with 
superstitions innumerable, the page on which is 
inscribed the name of this sanest of all Asiatics 

no 



ii 



II 



is the fairest and freest from cant and rant. 

The name of Zoroaster takes us back to a very 
remote period in the history of our humanity. 
It has been conjectured that when he began his 
career as a rehgious teacher he found his people, 
the Persians, worshiping the principle of Evil, 
or Ahriman, the Persian name for Devil. While 
Zoroaster was unable to wean his people from 
Ahriman, he did succeed in supplementing the 
fear of the devil with the love of God or Or- 
muzd, the principle of goodness. The dualism 
is the distinguishing characteristic of the reHgion 
founded by Zoroaster, and is also its contribution 
to nearly all the other religions; for we find in 
Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism the 
same fundamental belief in the existence of a 
God invariably accompanied by his rival — the 
Devil. What the one creates, the other destroys ; 
what the one mends, the other mars ; God makes 
the light, the Devil the darkness ; God kindles the 
flame, the Devil tries to turn it into smoke ; God 
is omnipotent in wisdom, the Devil is equally 
resourceful in mischief. Zoroastrianism or 
Mazdaism, then, is the parent of dualism, namely, 
of the eternal struggle between these two arch- 
powers for the possession of man. 

Without denying to Zoroaster the name of re- 
former, and also of empire-builder, — for doubt- 
less his services contributed to the political ex- 
pansion of Persia, making her on land and sea, 

III 



« 



one of the great powers of ancient times, and 
duly acknowledging the beginnings of a high 
moraltiy in the collected scriptures called the 
AvestaSy attributed to his pen, — we are compelled 
by the evidence to charge the religion of Zo- 
roaster^ that is to say, the religion of dualism, of 
a God plus a Devil, With having invented, so to 
speak, the awful doctrine of hell, and therefore 
of religious persecution. It was a natural con- 
sequence of the belief in a God opposed by a 
Devil to make war upon all who were not on the 
side of God. And as the prophet is himself in- 
variably the vicar or the apostle of God, it fol- 
lowed that all those who refused obedience to 
his will were in opposition to the Deity and 
should be suppressed, even as God is trying to 
suppress the Devil, his antagonist. 

When we approach the Jewish-Christian faith, 
we find the dark stream of religious persecution, 
which had its source in Zoroastrianism, grown 
into a raging sea. The three religions, Judaism, 
Christianity and Mohammedanism, bear to one 
another the relation of parent and children. 
Christianity is the elder, and Mohammedanism 
the younger daughter of Judaism. The predomi- 
nant trait, which is common to them all, is ex- 
clusiveness. It is impossible to be humanitarian 
or universal and exclusive at the same time, 
which is another way of saying that, where the 
spirit of exclusiveness holds sway, there religious 

112 



toleration will be considered a crime, both 
against God and the State. Of course in all 
three of these faiths are to be found passages 
which seem to possess an accent of universality. 
But it is a universality conditioned on the con- 
version of the whole world to the faith in ques- 
tion. "My house shall be a house of prayer for 
all nations," writes the Jewish prophet, but ob- 
serve it says, — "My house," — which means that 
the whole world will come to worship in a Jew- 
ish temple. It does not mean that Pagan and 
Christian, without embracing the Jewish faith, 
may each worship his own "Christ" in a Jewish 
synagogue. It is in this same spirit that the 
Mohammedan throws open his mosque, and the 
Christian his cathedral to the whole world. 
Brotherhood in these religions is limited to those 
of the true faith. The misbeliever is an alien to 
whom it is a sin even to say "God speed." Inter- 
marriage is forbidden with a view to emphasize 
the fact that only through conversion can a 
stranger become a friend or a brother. Such ex- 
clusiveness was bound to breed hatred and per- 
secution. 

And as men make their gods, an exclusive peo- 
ple will have an exclusive god. The Bible con- 
ception of God is one of the most repellant in 
religious literature. We may say it is the least 
successful attempt at god-making on record. 
The three religions we have named have all one 

113 



and the same God, with only unimportant varia- 
tions. The authors of the Bible seem to have 
labored under the impression that to make their 
God acceptable they had only to make him in- 
tensely partisan. One who loves his own only. 
But they have made him, necessarily, as terrible 
as he is exclusive. He is not only called a jealous 
God, but also a consuming fire, a man of war. 
It is expressly stated that ''He is angry every 
day.'' The English translators have interpolated 
the words — ''with the wicked," — but the original 
as rendered into Latin, German, French and other 
languages, shows plainly that the editors of King 
James' Version took undue liberties with the text. 
The Revised Version has dropped the words 
zvith the wicked, and the text now conveys the 
same meaning in the English Bible as in the 
German, which reads: "Und ein Gott, der tag- 
lich drauet," and in the French, "La colere the 
Dieu est tojours prete a eclater." "Irascitur per 
singulos dies," are the words in the Vulgate. 

To please his makers the God of the Jew, the 
Christian and the Mohammedan orders the ex- 
termination of all who object to be converted: 
"And thou shalt consume all the people which 
the Lord thy God shall deliver thee: thine eye 
shall have no pity upon them." (^) Each of the 
three religions, unfortunately, has been too will- 
ing to obey to the letter this unfraternal injunc- 



(1) Deut. 7: 16. 



114 



tion introduced into the mouth of the Deity by 
the priesthood. As the authors of the above text 
claimed to be inspired the priests of these three 
reHgions have shed more blood than all the 
tyrants put together. This is a fearful but abso- 
lutely just indictment against the Jewish-Chris- 
tian-Mohammedan religion. 

But confining for a moment our remarks to 
Christianity alone, it must be admitted that in 
spite of its doctrine of hell, it has certain redeem- 
ing features about it which are of undoubted 
pagan origin and which we do not find in Juda- 
ism. The advantage of Christianity over Judaism 
consists in the former's generous efforts to save 
the whole world, irrespective of race or color, 
from the doom of hell. This is the contribution 
of the Gentile to Christianity. The words of 
Jesus, ''Go ye into all the world and preach the 
Gospel to every creature," were in all probability 
put in his mouth by a Gentile. What Jesus 
really said, if, indeed, we can be sure of anything 
that he said, was, ''Go not into the cities of the 
Gentiles," assuring them at the same time that 
the world would come to an end before they had 
even finished preaching to the lost sheep of Israel. 
Jesus as a Jew shared the belief of his people 
that "none are beloved before God but Israel." 
It was the Greek and Latin genius that made of 
Christianity more than merely another Jewish 
sect, by breathing into it as much of its universal- 

115 



ism as a dogmatic religion would admit. Of 
course^ the best service which paganism ren- 
dered Christianity was to introduce into it a new 
God — the man God as against the all-God Je- 
hovah — who, by personal sacrifices, conquered 
for the whole world an opportunity to be saved. 
Christ, as a secondary God^ — or a junior God — 
was the revolt of the Gentile world against the 
Jewish Deity. Whatever good Christianity has 
done is due to this rebellion which culminated in 
compelling the dread Jehovah to admit the man- 
God into full and equal partnership with him. 
The Jews call this blasphemy ; but Christianity, 
inspired by the Hellenic and Latin genius, weak- 
ened the divinity by dividing it into three — later 
into four, by the addition of a woman to the num- 
ber. In this alone, namely, in making a new 
God, and thus taking from the old solitary deity 
many of his ancient and Semitic prerogatives, 
Christianity has proved its greater sympathy with 
paganism than with Judaism. 

Another leading trait of these three religions 
is their fear and hatred of freedom of thought. 
To perpetuate their own power the priests of this 
family of religions found it necessary to suppress, 
at first by threats of divine punishments, and 
when these failed, by force of arms, all inquiry. 
Faith, which meant unquestioning acquiescence, 
was of God ; Science, which meant investigation, 
was of the Devil. The agents of this group of 

ii6 



religions which between them have held Europe, 
America and a great part of Asia and Africa 
captive for many centuries, prompted their God 
to solemnly declare in infallible documents, that 
a father should not hesitate to kill his own son, 
or a son his own father; that a mother should 
destroy her child, and the child its mother, — to 
prevent them from professing or following an- 
other religion. It is impossible to bring a more 
horrible accusation against a set of men. The 
worst thing that we can say against the profes- 
sion of the law or of medicine, pales into insig- 
nificance when compared with this specimen of 
the inhumanity of the priesthood. The day of 
judgment is here, and the founders of these three 
religions are summoned to answer at the bar of 
humanity, awakened from sleep, for the whole- 
sale massacres which have dipped the world m 
blood, for the Spanish and Scottish inquisitions, 
and for the sectarianism and hatred which con- 
verted men of the same race and country into 
implacable enemies and persecutors of one an- 
. other. 

The religious commentators defend the respec- 
tive scriptures of these religions by saying that 
their teachings were limited to the mental level 
of the times and the peoples. But if God had to 
descend to the plane of man and become brutal 
and bigoted like him, how was man benefited by 
his intercourse with the divine? Furthermore, 

117 



if the mental and moral limitations of a people 
determine the character of revelation, what ad- 
vantage is there in having a revelation? More- 
over, because a child cannot comprehend algebra, 
is it right to teach him that one and one make 
three? Is the inability of the primitive man to 
appreciate the higher virtues of generosity, jus- 
tice and fellowship with aliens, an excuse to 
command him to exterminate his neighbors, (^) 
to bear false witness, (^) to practice immorality, 
to plunder, to be cruel and credulous? (^) If 
a revelation cannot civilize a barbarian, what is 
its value? 

But while denouncing intolerance we must not 
become intolerant ourselves. With all their faults 
these three religions have been, in their day, of 
considerable service to the world. We may justly 
say of them that having done all the bad and 
all the good of which they were capable it is time 
for them to step aside and leave the field to 
science. Am I asked what good these religions 
have done? I answer: They have taught man 
science by forbidding it. It may sound strange, 
but religion aroused human curiosity, which 
again discovered science. The time came when 
man was not satisfied with information only 
about the next world, about spirits and demons, 
about mysteries and divine attributes; he asked 

(1) Deut. 7: 16, etc. (2) Jer. 4: 10; I. Kings 22: 23; 
Ezek. 14: 9, etc. (S) Exod. 12: 35, 36; I. Sam. 16: 1, 2,; 
Exod. 1; 18-20, etc. 

ii8 



also information about this world, about man, the 
past history of the earth and so forth. Just as 
by seeking the philosopher's stone men discov- 
ered chemistry, and by the way of astrology they 
came to the science of astronomy, and by the 
way of sorcery and magic to the knowledge of 
medicine, — so did theology develop into philo- 
sophy. 

Religion also must be credited with having been 
the first to give man a system of thought. Now a 
system, however crude, is a work of art. It is 
a creation. It is a putting together of ideas and 
beliefs for the purpose of arriving at a conclu- 
sion. Thus religion taught man to think connect- 
edly, to see the relation of 'things, and to think 
for a purpose, that is to say, to reason. The 
savage has ideas too, but he can not put them 
together, he can not classify or systematize them. 
There has been iron in the bowels of the earth, 
and lying on the surface in many places for long 
ages, but only when man could give shape and 
form to it did he enter the path of civilization. 
In the same sense, not until man could forge, 
fuse and combine his ideas into a system of some 
kind, did he begin his intellectual evolution. Re- 
ligion started civilization by enabling man to put 
his ideas together. Even as the worm was the 
prophecy of the coming man, the creed was the 
beginning of science. 

Let us see if we cannot make this idea a little 

119 



clearer : All religions represent the effort of the 
human mind to understand itself and its environ- 
ment. At the core of every religion, however 
crude, there is a philosophy, — that is to say, every 
belief, be it ever so foolish, has a meaning, and 
at one time was a help to man. 

The savage carries a fetish on his person to 
secure himself against evil. The civilized man 
crosses himself in the presence of danger. Both 
practices embody a truth, and it is the province 
of criticism to define that truth. 

When the turbaned Oriental, standing in his 
mosque, pronounces the name of Allah with such 
awe and joy, what is it he means? In his grop- 
ing w^ay he is aiming to be scientific ; he is trying 
his hand at philosophy ; he wishes to put his fin- 
ger upon the nerve of the universe; he is trying 
to bring the multifarious forces of nature about 
him into a focus ; he is trying to evolve harmony 
out of chaos, — music out of the discord and 
babel of life; and he thinks he has succeeded, 
when he has pronounced the word Allah! Of 
course, his philosophy is that of a beginner, but 
it is a philosophy, nevertheless. He is an em- 
bryo scientist, taking his first lesson in logical 
reasoning. That is the truth at the heart of all 
religions which we must recognize. They repre- 
sent the desire of man to make things clear to 
his intelligence, and to wrest life's secret from 
the universe. Man seeks knowledge because in 

120 



the consciousness of knowledge there is happi- 
ness and power. The strain of ignorance is in- 
tolerable to him. Darkness embarrasses his mind 
and he seeks the light by instinct. 

The primitive man, for instance, alarmed by 
the things he did not understand, proposed ex- 
planation after explanation, in his effort to throw 
off the darkness from his mind. When the sky 
frowned upon him and the winds wailed in his 
ears, he did not know what to make of them, and 
felt insecure until he could satisfy himself that he 
understood how and why the dark clouds swept 
over the face of the skies and the winds moaned 
about his dwelling. He felt relieved when he 
believed that he had grasped the situation. His 
explanation that the sun and the wind were free 
agents, like himself, acting from choice, as he 
thought he did, was a very crude one, but it was 
an explanation, all the same, and for the time 
being proved helpful to him. From the very 
beginning, man has shown a hunger for knowl- 
edge, which has put his mind in action. Relig- 
ion, then, is man's first attempt at scientific 
and philosophical thinking. Religion is, in a 
sense, the primer of science and philosophy. The 
mistake we make is to declare this primer infal- 
lible. We take the first composition of the child, 
so to speak — his first prattle in the presence of 
the tiniverse — and pronounce it inspired. When 
Moses, or whoever wTote the first chapters of 

121 



the book of Genesis, described how man and 
woman were fashioned, he was trying to be scien- 
tific, in his modest way. But the best explana- 
tion that his mentality could produce was that 
God took some clay from the ground and 
kneaded it into the form of man, and from one 
of the ribs of this man he formed woman. It is 
not his science we commend ; it is his desire to ex- 
plain man's origin that honors him, for out of 
that desire, philosophy, science, — progress — are 
born. 

But there is another truth hidden in the bosom 
of all religions which it is the mission of philo- 
sophy to disclose. The first truth I called your 
attention to was that the primitive beliefs of man 
represented his effort to understand the world 
and himself ; the second truth is that all the relig- 
ious rites and ceremonies, the most superstitious 
of them, embody likewise a truth; — they repre- 
sent the effort of man to get the control of the 
universe into his own hands. If today we pos- 
sess any power over the resources and forces of 
nature, if we can utilize them, command them to 
do our errands, to wait upon us, to serve us, — 
this power is the fruition of that primitive desire 
of our barbarian ancestors to get the gods under 
control by presents and compliments. 

The scientist masters the laws of nature, — the 
movements of the atmosphere, the currents of the 
ocean, the lightning's secret, for the purpose of 

122 



putting a bit into their mouths to control them 
for human service ; but the priest when he offered 
his bloody sacrifices, when he performed his in- 
cantations, and repeated magical formulas, had 
the same aim in view, — the control of the uni- 
verse. As soon as primitive man concluded that 
the sun, for example, or the river, was a god, he 
set to work to learn the habits, tastes, pleasure of 
his gods, that he might prevent them from hurt- 
ing him and encourage them to gratify his needs. 
In other words, he wished to replace them in the 
government of the world. He did not feel safe 
until he could get the reins in his own hands. 
When I was in one of the churches of Florence, 
and stood looking at a figure of the pope with 
the keys of heaven and hell in his hand, it 
dawned upon me that man, from time imme- 
morial, has coveted the ownership of the uni- 
verse, and even in his feebleness gave himself the 
satisfaction of holding the keys in his own hands. 
But it would be unreasonable to continue to 
preserve and propagate these religions at great 
cost to the people, and also at the detriment of 
more important interests — on the ground that at 
one time, when man was but a child, they were 
of service to him. Our ancestors before the age 
of iron used tools made of stone. Shall these still 
be given the preference despite the better and 
more useful implements of modern times — be- 
cause, forsooth, they started our race in its career 

123 



of progress ? Shall the candle light be permitted 
to prejudice us against electricity; the stage- 
coach against the locomotive; the cave of the 
savage aginst the sanitary dwellings of modern 
cities; or the primitive forms of communication 
against the wonderful wireless? Why, then, 
should Moses or Mohammed or Jesus stand in 
the way of the science of the twentieth century? 
If we may discard our mother's hut or the rag 
she clothed herself with at one time, why not 
also her religion? True enough both hut and 
rag served a purpose and marked a stage in the 
evolution of man, but the purpose they served 
was to fit us for something better, that is to say, 
to make us discontented with and rebellious 
against the hut and the rag forever. 

The day of faiths is over. They belong to the 
furniture of the past. The glorious reign of 
Science has begun. Thought like a fruit on the 
tree of evolution has at last ripened. The glow 
of the sun, and the tints of the sky are upon her. 
The countries which were the first to replace 
faith by knowledge have invariably been the 
first also in civilization. While Palestine re- 
mained a desert, Greece became the garden of 
the world. Whatever of beauty there is in our 
lives today, we owe it to the immortal Greeks. 
Truth and goodness flourish in all their glory only 
among a free and intelligent people. Where 
there is an infallible faith there can be no liberty 

124 



of thought, and without liberty of thought there 
is no mind, and without mind man is not dif- 
ferent from the brute. 



125 



PUBLICATIONS 



On the Literature Table at Orchestra Hall on 

Sundays, and at 140 Dearborn St., 

Suite JO'/, during the week. 

Twelve Lectures. Bound in Cloth, $1.50. 

A New Catechism. Fifth Edition, Revised and En- 
larged, with Portrait of Author, $1.00. 

"It is the boldest, the brightest, the most varied 
and informing of any work of the kind extant. 
The book is a cyclopedia in a nutshell." Literary 
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The Truth About Jesus. Was He a Myth ? 

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show the evolution of the Christ-idea. Price, paper 
50c. Bound, $1.00. 

Mangasarian — Crapsey Debate on the Historicity 
OF Jesus. 25c. 

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Know Thyself. — A Benediction. (A motto suitable 
for framing.) 25c. 



3 1910 

LECTURES 



IOC a Copy by mail, and three for 2^c at the hall. 

Rome-Rule in Ireland. 

Postlude : Francisco Ferrer. 

The Church in Politics. — Americans Beware! 

How THE Bible Was Invented. Revised, Tenth Edi- 
tion. 

Woman Suffrage, or the Child-Bearing Woman and 
Civilization. 

The Kingdom of God in Geneva Under Calvin. 

The Martyrdom of Hypatia. 

Debate With a Presbyterian. With Prelude on 
Theodore Roosevelt. 

The Rationalism of Shakespeare — His Opinion of 
THE Jev.' and the CHRISTIAN IN The Merchant of 
Venice. 

Morality Without God. 

Christian Science. A Comedy in Four Acts. 

What Was the Religion of Shakespeare? 

Bryan on Religion. 

Christian Science Analyzed and Answered. 

The Religion of Washington, Jefferson and 
Franklin,^ -^ ^ tm 

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